Benchmarks I
Test Setup
- DFI NB80-EA Granite Bay motherboard
- P4 2.66Mhz CPU, 512MB DDR3500 RAM
- Seagate 80GB SATA150 Hard Disk Drive
- Maxtor 120GB 8MB ATA133 Cache Hard Drive on IDE
- Maxtor 60GB 2MB ATA100 Cache Hard Drive
- 2 Weston Digital 80GB 8MB Cache drives on Promise Raid Controller on Raid0
- Speedfan utility for SMART monitoring including hard drive temperature
HD Tech - Read Results Graph
The HD Tech benchmark is recognised as the most comprehensive hard drive test available. The benchmark evaluates the Hard drives performance across the whole drive regardless of how the drive is partitioned. It is common for performance to drop the further into the drive the test goes. This is due to the sectors at the end of the disk being physically further from the drives starting point.
Seagate SATA ATA150
![](\"http://img.hexus.net/seagatesata/SATA%20HDTach.JPG\")
Maxtor ATA133
![](\"http://img.hexus.net/seagatesata/Maxtor120GB%20HDTach.JPG\")
The graphs above show two interesting trends. Although the computer was able to read information from the Maxtor drive faster than the Seagate drive, the opposite is true when it comes to writing data. The Seagate drive shows a consistent write speed with a few downward troughs, where as the Maxtor drive shows a few peaks in performance. Secondly although both drives show the expected reduction in read speed the further into the drive the test goes, the Seagate drive shows a slower decline dropping from circa 40k to 25k. The Maxtor drops more steeply from 50k down to 25k.
The graphs below show the results of all the HD Tech tests carried out during the review. As the benchmark requires unpartitioned drives to test writing speeds only two drives were able to be tested, the Seagate SATA and the Maxtor 120GB 8MB Cache.
Read speed average results
![](\"http://img.hexus.net/seagatesata/HDtachReadGraph.jpg\")
Write speed average results
![](\"http://img.hexus.net/seagatesata/HDtachWriteGraph.jpg\")
The Seagate SATA drive did not perform as well as we had hoped in the read tests. Performance was lower than the other 8MB Cache drives whether in a raid configuration or straight forward IDE. The drive is far from being slow, but with the same 8MB Cache and the equivalent of ATA150 transfer speeds we hoped for more. Despite the average scores showing lower the Seagate drive did display better consistency across the drive as a whole and also proved significantly better in the write tests, some 30% better than the Maxtor.
