Performance in PCMark04

There have appeared no comprehensive programs for testing hard disk drives since Ziff Davis Media Inc. abandoned their WinBench project. Considering the lack of alternatives, PCMark’04 enjoyed a warm welcome and earned popularity as a simple-to-use and comprehensible benchmarking tool. Notwithstanding a number of objective drawbacks of this test, we can’t but check out how Hitachi HDDs have progressed in it.

The diagrams show median values for 10 runs of the test.

The user will feel the new computer being faster even at the step of booting the OS up. The newest Deskstar 7K1000 is going to leave the most pleasant impression, but the T7K500 Serial ATA and the 7K500 and T7K250 models with a Parallel ATA interface aren’t much slower. It’s interesting that the classic ATA is preferable to Serial ATA in this test although all the HDDs are tested on the same controller with the same driver. The server-oriented Deskstar 7K400 and the T7K250 and 7K500 with a Serial ATA interface, which have distinguished themselves in some of the earlier tests due to their NCQ support, aren’t brilliant here. This gives us another reason to suspect a lack of NCQ in the two newest HDD models from Hitachi.

The Deskstar 7K1000 is far ahead of the others in this application loading test. The similar results of the three 500GB HDDs indicate that this test is not sensitive to the amount of buffer memory or the linear speed but depends on the total storage capacity of the HDD.

Except for the identical results of the Deskstar 7K1000 and T7K500 the overall picture resembles the FC-Test results. The HDDs with an 8MB buffer are on the losing side whereas the 32MB buffer doesn’t seem to bring in much profit.

As opposed to the previous test, this one seems to value the amount of the buffer memory and the new Deskstar 7K1000 is unrivalled here. The T7K500 is again slower than the older 7K500, but both are far ahead of the rest of the HDDs that are equipped with only 8 megabytes of memory.

The overall ratings line the HDDs up in an orderly manner except for the Deskstar T7K250 Serial ATA which falls out of the order. Its low score can be explained by defects of the particular sample (for example, its linear read speed in IOMeter did not correspond to its specification).

The General Usage test has the biggest weight in the overall rating, putting the Deskstar 7K1000 on top with a considerable lead. The four models with same-density platters and an 8MB cache buffer have absolutely identical results. The newer models increase their advantage in PCMark04 slowly and the T7K1000 makes a performance jump only due to its 32MB buffer.