Review: Allan "Zardon" Campbell

 

 

 

HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives (ZIP/JAZZ), flash devices, and RAID arrays. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers of software as possible and get as close to the physical performance of the device possible.

Western Digital JB SE 80 gig - 50.3mb max, 28.2 min and average 41.8 mb/s

 

Western Digital Raptor - 80.8mb max, 37.1 min and average 50.6 mb/s

What we can ascertain after reading over these figures is that the raptor drive is significantly faster than the IDE 80 gig JB SE drive with there being a differential of over 30 megabytes per second on the maximum read rates, average and minimum speeds are also up by around 10 mb/s. It is very important we look at the CPU utilization of each drive in this test and im a little surprised to see CPU utilization at 73.5% for the WD drive, I benched this several times with fresh reboots under various conditions and it would not go under 70% in this test. I refuse to use nvidias IDE drivers due to stabillity problems ive experienced so perhaps this is an issue with the MS ide drivers or some other compatibility problem with the Abit motherboard. Compared to the Raptor CPU figures this is excessively high.

Random access time reported by HDTach are quite different to the previous Sandra tests as you can see, with reported times up from 5 and 7ms to 8.2ms and 13.2 respectively. Both drives are capable of massive burst rates almost reaching 100 megabytes a second.

 

 

Next: In the real world and final thoughts