| Hitachi Deskstar 7K400 vs Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 400 GB |
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For today's benchmarks, we will conduct a few different tests in a couple different ways. We will take some tests using HD Tach, PCMark, File Copy, as well as some game loading tests. We will test the Seagate drive with NCQ enabled and disabled against the Hitachi drive to see the potential benefits of NCQ. In addition, for kicks, we will throw in a old Seagate 40GB 5400 rpm to the testing. Lastly, again for kicks, we will put both these 400GB drives in a RAID 0 configuration and take some benchmarks.
Unfortunately the motherboard used in the test system does not support Native Command Queuing, so thanks to Promise Technologies we will be using the Promise FastTrak TX4200 controller card. A review of the TX4200 card will be released in the near future.
Test setup:
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AMD Athlon64 3400+ CPU
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Albatron K8X800 Pro II Motherboard
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Crucial 512MB PC3200 DDR
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Albatron GeForceFX 5700 Ultra Graphics card
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Promise FastTrak TX4200 Controller card
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Windows XP Professional SP2 (All updates)
Above are the HD Tach 3 tests which we conducted on the four drives, plus on the Hitachi and Seagate 400GB drives in a RAID 0 configuration. With no surprise the RAID 0 tests come out on top on 3 out of 4 of those tests, and the Seagate 5400 RPM drive is left in the dust. On the surprising side, the NCQ enabled Seagate drive is actually scoring lower in the average read and burst speed tests.