SAS Storage: High-Performance Hard Drives

Application Performance: PCMark05

The Windows XP Startup benchmark of PCMark05 requires both high throughput and quick access times, and apparently, fast drives do not always necessarily dominate this benchmark as well. Both Hitachi and Seagate do very well, but the drives do not overtake the Fujitsu 15,000 RPM drives—those seem to be the better choice for workstation-type PCs that have to handle lots of applications, while Hitachi and Seagate have probably optimized their firmware for server-type workloads. Nevertheless, the results are very good.

As expected, the two new SAS drives dominate the file write benchmark in PCMark05. Every other 15,000 RPM drive is clearly slower, especially when looking at the impressive results of the Cheetah 15K.6.