IOMeter is an open source input/output measuring tool for
disk and network subsystem performance. The default benchmark is
run for five minutes on each configuration.
Another test where the sheer speed of the
74GB WD740 Raptors puts them ahead. IOMeter measures how many read and
write operations per second each drive is able to process, and the Raptors come
out far ahead of the 7200RPM Seagate drives.
Doom 3 is the
most advanced game to date. it takes advantage of the latest videocard
technology and pushes the processing power of the CPU to its absolute limit.
At its highest setting, Ultra quality, texture sizes pass the 500MB mark which
means even tomorrow's videocards will have a hard time running everything. The frame rates
in the game itself are locked at 60 fps so anything above that point is wasted.
Each test was run once.
| Doom3 |
| LQ 640x480: |
FPS |
Ranking |
| Western Digital Raptor WD740 (single) |
89.5 |
   |
| Western Digital Raptor WD740 (RAID 0) |
89.2 |
|
| Western Digital Raptor WD740 (RAID 1) |
89.5 |
|
| Seagate Barracuda ST380013AS (single) |
88.3 |
   |
| Seagate Barracuda ST380013AS (RAID 0) |
85.2 |
|
| Seagate Barracuda ST380013AS (RAID 1) |
86.7 |
|
Well, hard disk performance seems to be fairly irrelevant
to gaming benchmarks, but the Raptors manage to squeeze out a very slight
performance advantage here. Honestly though, the only place
a faster hard drive is likely to have any effect during gaming, is when
loading maps.
Final Thoughts on
the Raptor
The first obvious
conclusion is that 74GB WD740 Raptor is one fast drives. As
we rather anticipated they would, the 10,000RPM Western Digital Raptor WD740s consistently out-paced
the 7200RPM 80GB Seagate drives in almost every test.
What was more impressive was that the WD740 Raptor drive was also
quieter and didn't produce much more heat than the lower-RPM Seagate units.
The SATA interface obviously has a fine future
for business applications. As this pair of WD740 10,000RPM drives has
showed, you can now bring enterprise level hard disk performance down to the
average desktop or workstation without spending hundreds on a SCSI
controller. SATA II adoption is just around the corner, so things are only
going to get better.
While quick hard drives certainly help a
system out, the Western Digital WD740
Raptor drives are not going to speed up everything in your PC, as
our Winstone and Doom3 benchmarks illustrated. That being said, in hard drive
intensive tasks like file and database applications, the extra spindle speed will certainly give
you a leg up.
At a retail cost of about $215CAN ($175US) each, the Western Digital Raptor
WD740 hard drive commands a price premium, but that is justified by
its speed over comparable SATA and parallel ATA hard drives. If you know
you need hard drive speed for your applications, or you just want your desktop
to feel a little bit 'snappier', consider investing in one, or a RAID'd pair of
these speedy dinosaurs.
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IOMeter V2004.07.30
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