Test Setup

I'll be using our Core2 Quad machine for this test, because we still haven't found a solution to the hard drive speeds in Linux on the Sapphire 780G motherboard.

Windows Usage & Performance

The drive was detected in Windows without a problem. Windows show the total space as 931.51GB. That's more space that I have in my server, and this is only a single drive! To benchmark the drive, I'm going to use the Sandra suite to benchmark the drive, as well as real-time copying.

As I'd expect from any newer drive, the 7K1000 is very quiet. I don't hear much of anytime coming from the case aside from the hum of fans.

Sandra Suite

SiSoft provides two excellent hard disk benchmarks with the Sandra suite: Physical Disks, and Filesystems. I'm going to use the physical disk benchmark, which will benchmark read speed, write speed, and latency/access times.

Sandra reports the average drive read speed as being 64MB/sec, with a 13ms random access time. This isn't bad at all, considering the drive moves data faster than the 36GB Western Digital Raptor. Aside from the larger 32MB cache, the hard drive platters are also more densely populated, making for faster read speeds.

I've decided to omit the results for the Sandra's write benchmark, as it was reading over 100MB/sec in speed. After turning off the drive's "advanced performance" in Control Panel, write performance dropped to a meager 6.9MB/sec. Both of these results are inconsistent with both the drive and other drives I've seen. I'm hoping that actual copy benchmarks will yield better results.

Copy Tests

To get a realistic idea of what kind of performance to expect from the drive without relying on synthetic benchmarks such as Sandra, I'm going to use a 750MB movie file to copy back and forth between the Hitachi 7K1000 and two 36GB Raptors in RAID0.

For the drive's write speed, I finally see something much more acceptable when compared to the results from the Sandra suite. I don't have an explanation for Sandra's readings, but the results from this copy test were much more satisfying.

The results from the read test are very similar to Sandra's results, but slightly slower. This may have been a bottleneck imposed between the three drives (7K1000 and two Raptors).