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1TB Hard Drive Roundup
Page 2 of 3 For drive testing, Windows XP SP2 with the latest patches was used. The drives were connected to the onboard SATA II connector on the ASUS A8N-E with an Athlon 64 4000+ CPU with 2 GB of DDR Ram. Each test was performed in triplicate and averaged to gain the final result. For some of the tests, I used an ISO file which I created from the Need For Speed Carbon DVD. This yielded a file of considerable size which, though not playable, has approximately 4.2 GB. For drive comparison I have labeled the Barracuda 7200.11 the AS drive and the Barracuda ES.2 the NS drive. HD Tach Benchmarking For this set of benchmarks I decided to use Simpli Software's HDTach v RW 3.0.1.0. The drive was tested unformatted. The full bench (variable zone, etc) for both read and write was performed 3 times and the numbers averaged to yield the final result. I was able to test both the Sequential Read and Sequential Write as well as the Random Access Time and the Burst Read Speed. Average Read and Write Test This test is the average (in MB/s) from both the Sequential Read and Sequential Write. Due to differences in location on the platter, we will not get a consistent read across the entire disk. However, the average can give an idea of what to expect by factoring in both the fast and slow sectors of a disk.  From this first test, it is apparent that the two different designs are going to show far more differences than previous hard drive testing has shown. Sequential Read Test This test is fairly self-explanatory. The benchmark reads every half gig across the entire disk. If you are wondering, that is 1863 data points per disk. This test is what the average data is extracted from.  It is very easy to see that the Seagate technology, even between two different drives, is superior to the Hitachi. This is in sharp contrast to the results we saw in our previous 500 GB Roundup. Sequential Write Test Same as the Sequential Read test, except writing.  It is not surprising that the write test mimics the read test in shape, or that the Hitachi lags behind both Seagates. DiskBench This benchmark is closer to the "real world" experience one might see with a drive. The software performs various functions common to most users and times them. These include creating, reading, and copying files. Batch File Creation For this test a series of files are created in ever-increasing sizes. I started with a 480 MB file and topped out at a 1.6 GB file. The file sizes were in increments of 40MB.  Interestingly, the Hitachi drive is coming out ahead of both Seagate drives in the larger file sizes.  This is the same graph, except zoomed in to the region from 0.5 to 1 GB. Single File Read For this test I used the NFS Carbon DVD ISO I just created. This test is reading a single file from the disk.  For the single file read test, both of the Seagate drives bested the Hitachi by approximately 15 secs. Dual File Read Two separate files were read off of each drive simultaneously. The first was the Windows Server 2003 Enterprise ISO. This file is 569,366,528 bytes in size. The second one was the NFS carbon DVD ISO I previously used. Again, its size is 4,253,657,088 bytes.  Ok, it's official, the Hitachi drive is stinking up the place! The graph says it all. Dual File Creation Two files are created simultaneously in this test. Each file is 503,316,480 bytes in size.  Again, the Hitachi drive seems to be doing a good job at lagging. Although the result of this test is far closer than the last, the Hitachi drive is still about 1.5 seconds slower. File Copy The last test was a single file copy from the disk to a folder on the same disk. Again, for this I chose to use my NFS DVD ISO.  Redemption! It looks like we finally found something that the Hitachi drive is good at. The Hitachi drive completed the copy almost 30 seconds faster than either of the Seagate drives. IOmeter For this test, I used the same read/write specification used to previously test NAS devices. This is a 2 min test that first uses a 256K write of a 1 GB file, followed by a 2 min 256K read of the same 1GB file. Each test was performed 3 times and averaged. 
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