Winstone 2004	Source: Zdnet

Business Winstone 2004 runs real applications through a series of scripted activities and uses the time a PC takes to complete these activities to produce its performance scores.

Business Winstone 2004:
AMD Athlon64 System Results	Points	Ranking
Western Digital Raptor WD740 HDD	27.5
Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD4000KD HDD	25.1
Western Digital RaptorX WD1500AHFD HDD	32.7

Hard drive speed certainly makes a difference here in Business Winstone 2004. Not sure if a user would notice the bump, since these office application benchmarks are generally user limited.

SiSoft Sandra 2005	Source:Sandra

Sandra is designed to test the theoretical power of a complete system as well as the individual components. The results are also purely theoretical and may not represent real world performance.

Sisoft Sandra 2005 Storage Benchmark Results
Drives	Drive Index:	Buffered Read:	Buffered Write:	Random Read:	Sequential Read:	Random Write:	Sequential Write:	Average Access time:
Western Digital Raptor WD740 HDD	58	121	89	39	69	52	68	11
Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD4000KD HDD	55	-	-	43	62	45	62	9
Western Digital RaptorX WD1500AHFD HDD	72	132	88	55	83	57	80	6
Units:	MB/s	MB/s	MB/s	MB/s	MB/s	MB/s	MB/s	milliseconds

The overall bandwidth results are very close between these two WD hard drives. Average access times differ a little, but the Western Digital RaptorX WD1500AHFD scores within a few MB/s. Results are virtually the same with and without NCQ enabled.

HD Tach V3.0.1.0	Source: TCD Labs Inc.