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In our next
test, we used HD Tach mostly as a read performance
benchmark. While write performance is obviously an
area of concern, especially within video and audio recording
and editing applications, read performance on a given drive
is paramount to the over all "feel" of how responsive your
system is.
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HD
Tach Benchmarks |
|
Drive Read
Performance |
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DiamonMax Plus 9
SATA 150
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Barracuda V
SATA 150
 |
|
DiamondMax Plus 9
SATA 150 RAID 0
|
Barracuda V
SATA 150 RAID 0
 |
|
WD
SE ATA100
|
Diamond Max Plus 9
SATA 150 R/W
 |
HD Tach reports that
the DiamondMax Plus 9 SATA drive is faster than both the
Barracuda V and the Western Digital Special Edition ATA100
drive, in a single drive configuration. The DiamondMax
drive just edges out our perennial favorite WD drive here
and shows an even larger margin of gain over the Barracuda.
In the RAID 0 test, the DiamondMax Plus 9 absolutely leaves
the Barracuda V SATA RAID 0 array in the dust, showing more
than a 40% lead on the competitive Seagate array. The
other notable is the DiamondMax Plus 9 is significantly less
erratic, showing a much smoother bandwidth graph across the
entire array, during RAID 0 testing. Finally, we're not all
that confident in HD Tach's reporting of CPU utilization in
these tests. However, it does show the Maxtor
DiamondMax Plus 9 is relatively efficient in that regard,
even with a software RAID 0 setup, like the one we tested on
the Silicon Image controller in our test system.
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|
Winbench Business and Disk Access Winmarks |
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Business Disk
Winmarks |
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Next up is ZD's
Winbench Disk Winmark suite. Although this benchmark
is a bit dated, with many legacy Business and Professional
applications, used in testing, it still has is an excellent
indicator, with respect to real-word desktop performance and
overall throughput. We used the most recent version
2.0 of the software, for our testing.
The Winbench
Disk Access Winmark reports all drives here in this test,
within one or two percent of each other, with respect to
average access times, measured in milliseconds. Since
all drives tested here have a 7200 RPM spindle speed and
similar specified access times, this is no real surprise.
Then the tables turn quickly for the Business Disk Winmark,
in favor of the DiamondMax Plus 9 SATA drive. It
nearly matches the Seagate RAID 0 array performance, with
only a single drive configuration! Here the DiamondMax
Plus 9 shows its real strength, with a 34% margin of
performance over any single drive in this I/O intensive
test.
The picture is
becoming much clearer for the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 SATA
drive. Let's turn up the workload a bit and then dig
deeper into the stats.
High
End Disk Winmark, Details And Final Analysis |