Test-bed Specifications:
• Athlon 64 3500+ CPU
• Asus A8N-E Motherboard
• 2x512MB Crucial Ballistix DDR500 RAM
• Windows XP Home Edition SP2 OS
• 470-watt Enermax Noisetaker PSU
• 256MB DDR3 Sapphire X700Pro Video Card
• Santa Cruz Sound Card
• Samsung SpinPoint HD160JJ SATA2 Hard Drive
• Western Digital Caviar SE WD1600JD SATA Hard Drive
• Western Digital Caviar SE WD1200JB PATA Hard Drive
• Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 8 6L040J2 PATA Hard Drive
• Lite-On SOHW-1673S DVD±RW Drive
• Lite-On SOHW-832S DVD±RW Drive

Testing Methodology:

Firstly, all hard drives were formatted and partitioned to their maximum respective capacities using Windows XP Disk Management utility and the NTFS filing system, then defragmented. For testing and benchmarking several programs were used, including Sandra Professional 2005, PCMark Professional 2004, HD Speed, and lastly HD Tach. Each test was ran the same way on each drive, meaning there were no other programs running during testing and each test was preceded by a system reboot. To ensure maximum system stability and consistency nothing was overclocked during testing phases. Benchmark specific testing methods and configuration information will be noted immediately before the results of the respective programs.

Sandra Professional 2005:

In testing with Sandra Professional 2005 each test was ran twice. The highest results from each test were kept and others discarded.

Samsung SpinPoint 160GB SATA2	7ms
WD Caviar SE 160GB SATA	16ms
WD Caviar SE 120GB PATA100	23ms
Maxtor DMax +8 40GB PATA133	8ms

Dont have flash installed? click here for JPEG version of the above graph

 

PCMark Professional 2004:

With PCMark Professional 2004 the entire ‘HDD Test Suite’ was ran with exception of the ‘XP Startup’ test since none of the drives contained a Windows installation during test. This is so the maximum capacity of the 160GB hard drives could be tested.

Dont have flash installed? click here for JPEG version of the above graph

 

One can see from the results of these tests that the SpinPoint HD160JJ as compared to the other hard drives is fairly even, with exception of the file copying test. This is consistent with the other test results since this has to do with buffered read and write speeds.

Previous: Samsung Spinpoint

Next: Testing (2)