Although transfer rates are only performance “indicators”, often overestimated and sometimes even misleading, we can see that in the case of the WD740 they are indeed fully translating into application performance. Most notably we can see this with the Winbench 99 “High-end DiskMark.” The WD740 is twice as fast as the Diamond Plus 9 in this benchmark and 25% faster than the WD360 Raptor. The difference in RAID 0x2 is smaller, but still amounting to 50% over the Maxtor.
At first glance the performance difference in Content Creation 2002 and Business Winstone 2002 between the 2 Raptors and the 7,200 rpm Maxtor disks seems to be rather small in comparison with Winbench 99. There is a simple explanation for this: Content Creation 2002 and Business Winstone 2002 are testing overall system performance. They are not “I/O bound” as Winbench 99 and do therefore not isolate HDD performance as much as Winbench 99, which intentionally does so to magnify HDD performance differences. That is legitimate for testing purposes. On the other hand the differences shown in Content Creation and Business Winstone are much better representing a real world environment than Winbench 99. In this respect a performance difference between the 10,000 rpm WD740 and the 7,300 rpm Maxtor of up to almost 6% is quite substantial.
We ask the reader to have a look at the PCMark 2004 hard disk benchmark results, and there in particular at the “XP start-up time.” It shows that the WD740 has around 50% better Windows “XP Start-up time” than the Maxtor Diamond Plus 9. This is one of the few benchmarks results where the difference in scores is actually noticeable by the users.
Booting into Windows with the WD740 is indeed markedly faster than with the Diamond Plus 9 or other 7,200 rpm disk.
All original content copyright James Rolfe.
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