Test Methods and Testing Participants

We have transitioned to a new testbed sometime ago (see our article called Raptor X HDD from Western Digital: Only the "Naked" Truth... for details). The main feature of this testbed is a second-generation IDE controller - Promise SATAII150 TX2plus that supports Command Queuing protocols which are so important today. Moreover, the support for these protocols can be enabled/disabled easily using a Windows-based configuration utility, which allows examining the influence of NCQ on disk performance. Many reviewers use Silicon Image controllers for that purpose but those controllers disable the command queue altogether along with Native Command Queuing! The new testbed also features a faster CPU and Windows XP SP2 instead of Windows 2000 Professional.

The following programs are used in the tests:

• FC IOMark 03b15
• IOMeter 2003.02.15
• FC-Test 1.0 build 13
• PCMark04 Build 1.3.0
• PCMark05 Build 1.1.0
• WinBench 99 2.0.

We will compare the new HDD with top models from Hitachi’s earlier Deskstar series, beginning with the 7K250 with a Serial ATA interface, so that you could see all the improvements introduced into the architecture inherited from IBM. The exact model names, firmware versions and other parameters can be found in the next section.

The Promise SATAII150 supports not only Native Command Queuing but also the now-obsolete Tagged Command Queuing and we’ve finally got the opportunity to see how it affects performance. The results are really shocking as you’ll see.