Multitasking Performance - Business Winstone 2004

So far, NCQ proves to be a feature that could easily be nonexistent when running single tasks at a time. Because NCQ is a technology that is designed to handle random requests for data, the only way to test it efficiently is to employ a few applications and run a few tasks at the same time. This will definitely give a hard drive a workout.

Business Winstone 2004 includes a multitasking test as a part of its suite, which does the following:
"This test uses the same applications as the Business Winstone test, but runs some of them in the background. The test has three segments: in the first, files copy in the background while the script runs Microsoft Outlook and Internet Explorer in the foreground. The script waits for both foreground and background tasks to complete before starting the second segment. In that segment, Excel and Word operations run in the foreground while WinZip archives in the background. The script waits for both foreground and background tasks to complete before starting the third segment. In that segment, Norton AntiVirus runs a virus check in the background while Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Project, Microsoft Access, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft FrontPage, and WinZip operations run in the foreground."

Multitasking Performance - Business Winstone 2004

Multitasking Performance - Business Winstone 2004

Multitasking Performance - Business Winstone 2004

Multitasking Performance - Business Winstone 2004


Real World Tests - Game Level Load Times Real World Tests - Multitasking Performance
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  • StormGod - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    Hey Anandtech, please make sure your pages are 100% Firefox compatible! While were on the subject, you should really strive to make your pages HTML 4.01 compliant or XHTML 1.0 compliant.
  • cosmotic - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    I was going to comment on the headings too...
  • SLIM - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    The shading and color fill behind the headings and drive names is also missing in firefox. You can highlight the column headings to read what they are supposed to say in firefox. Glad I downloaded that ieview extension now.
  • bigboxes - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    Yup. The column headers for these tables do not show up in Firefox.
  • shoRunner - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    the column labels don't show up in firefox.
  • shoRunner - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

  • PuravSanghani - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    segagenesis: It seems to be an issue with our sound meter or noise reduction process. We will look into it for our next review. Besides the echo, the recordings should be clear enough to differentiate how each drive sounds.

    Nighteye2: Your requests will be fulfilled soon. :)
  • Nighteye2 - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    You know, with all this talk about NCQ, 1 question has not yet been answered: how does it work with RAID? Can you use NCQ on a RAID system?

    Also, I'd like to see these tests run on a RAID system, see the performance advantage it gives. Maybe compare 2 cheap, somewhat slower drives in a RAID array against a single HD that you can get for the same price?
  • segagenesis - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    The benchmarks are hardly cut and dry yes, but I do enjoy the fact Seagate has a 5 year warranty on drives. This after seeing the industry at one point was putting out 1-year warranty stock on drives and if you paid extra, 3 years.

    Raptors are the fastest drives ive ever seen but the lack of space keeps them from being all inclusive. I was kind of suprised that the 7200.8 beat out the Raptor as far as game loading went!

    Whats with the weird echo-ish sound recordings of the hard drive noise? What on earth did you use to do this?
  • FreshPrince - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    man, I need to learn how to use this...anyways...I bought 40 of these drives for my company.

    16 goes into one raid and another 16 goes into another raid. So far so good, I hear no complaints from my tech guys.

    Also, I took 2 and used it as a DFS file server, it's handling 75 users no problems. :-)

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