Performance in WinBench 99 2.0

We’ll finish this review by discussing the results of the old, yet still indispensable, ZD WinBench. After we began to limit the size of the formatted partition the test is run on, the results do not depend too heavily on the capacity of the HDD and have become more repeatable as well. It means they have something to say about the HDDs’ performance.

The Business Disk Winmark and Front Page tests in FAT32 report that there has been no progress until the T7K500 and 7K1000 models while these two new drives are equals. AVS agrees with them in general, but thinks that the 7K1000 is a little bit faster. The rest of the tests seem to note that the 16MB buffer of the 7K500 Serial ATA is not a trifle and ensures a considerable performance increase to it. VC++, Adobe Premier and, especially, Sound Forge are all glad at the improvements in processing small data blocks which we noticed earlier in the IOMeter tests.

And finally, the High-End Disk Winmark test says that the first performance jump occurred with the new electronics of the Deskstar T7K250, the second jump was due to the introduction of a 16MB buffer, and the third jump was achieved by modifications in the firmware algorithms for the T7K500/7K1000.

Thanks to their new electronics the Deskstar T7K250 and earlier models acquire a solid advantage in NTFS: 30% in Business Disk Winmark and over 80% in Visual C++! Many applications have reacted favorably to the increase in the amount of cache memory to 16MB. Photoshop and VC++ are also pleased with the improvements implemented in the 1TB model. Thus, a performance increase of 100% occurred in the WinBench NTFS tests in the three years since the release of the Deskstar 7K250!