Hard Drive
We have an invaluable resource for researching and learning about hard drive performance : our Interactive Hard Drive Charts. Here we already created a THG performance index, which is based on all the individual results.
We used four different hard drives to represent several year old 7,200 RPM hard drives, a state-of-the-art 7,200 RPM drive, and Western Digital’s fast Raptor drive at 10,000 RPM. As expected, the Raptor performs best and reaches an WEI of 5.9, while the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750 GB drive reaches 5.7. The two older drives - a Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 and a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 - reach 5.3 and 5.2 index points respectively. Obviously, Microsoft doesn’t take access time into account, or alternately, puts little emphasis on it.
Test Setup
| System Hardware | |
|---|---|
| Socket 775 I | Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 (Conroe 65 nm, 2.93 GHz, 4 MB L2 Cache) |
| Socket 775 II | Intel Core 2 Extreme X6700 (Kentsfield 65 nm, 2.66 GHz, 8 MB L2 Cache) |
| Socket 775 III | Intel Pentium D 840 (Smithfield 90 nm, 3.2 GHz, 2 MB L2 Cache) |
| Socket 775 IV | Intel Pentium 4 560 (Prescott 90 nm, 3.6 GHz, 1 MB L2 Cache) |
| Motherboard | Asus CommandoChipset : Intel P965, BIOS : 0803 |
| Common Hardware | |
| RAM | 2x 1024 MB DDR2-8000 (CL 4.0-4-4-12)Corsair CM2X1024-6400C3 XMS6403v1.1 |
| Graphics Card I | HIS X1900XTX IceQ3GPU : ATI Radeon X1900XTX (650 MHz)RAM : 512 MB GDDR3 (1550 MHz) |
| Graphics Card II | ATI Radeon X850XTGPU : ATI Radeon X850XT (520 MHz)RAM : 256 MB GDDR3 (1080 MHz) |
| Graphics Card III | ATI Radeon X700 ProGPU : ATI Radeon X1900XTX (425 MHz)RAM : 256 MB GDDR3 (865 MHz) |
| Graphics Card IV | Zotec GeForce 8800 GTSGPU : GeForce 8800 GTS (500 MHz)RAM : 320 MB GDDR3 (1200 MHz) |
| Graphics Card V | Nvidia Geforce 6800GTGPU : NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT (350 MHz)RAM : 256 MB GDDR3 (1000 MHz) |
| Hard Drive | 150 GB 10,000 RPM, 8 MB Cache, SATA/150Western Digital WD1500ADFD |
| DVD-ROM | Gigabyte GO-D1600C (16x) |
| Software | |
| Graphics Driver I | ATI Catalyst Suite 7.2 |
| Graphics Driver II | Nvidia ForceWare 97.92 |
| Platform Drivers Intel | INF-Treiber 8.1.1.1010 |
| DirectX | Version : 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904) |
| OS | Windows XP, Build 2600 SP2 |
We used an Asus Commando motherboard, which is based on the popular P965 chipset by Intel.
