Real World Tests - Multitasking Performance

To provide a real world example of multitasking, we use run Outlook and import 450MB of emails into an account. We then time how long it takes our benchmarking utlity to zip a single 300MB file. To compare our results, we calculate the difference between the multitasked process and the single task file zip process.

Outlook + File Zip 1 300MB File
NCQ/TCQ Status
Multitasked
File Zip Only
% Difference
Seagate 7200.8
(NCQ)
w/out NCQ
76.688
60.245
27.3%
w/NCQ
76.641
60.09
27.5%
Seagate 7200.7
N/A
77.947
65.188
19.6%
Hitachi 7K400
N/A
81.047
66.966
21%
Maxtor DiamondMax 10
(NCQ)
w/out NCQ
68.604
60.787
12.9%
w/NCQ
68.837
59.872
15%
Western Digital Raptor 740
w/out TCQ
68.956
59.244
16.4%
w/TCQ
Samsung SpinPoint SP1614C
N/A
72.028
62.222
15.8%
Samsung SpinPoint SP1614N
N/A
74.532
60.321
23.6%
Samsung SpinPoint SP1604N
N/A
77.488
61.519
26%
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9
N/A
80.722
61.331
31.7%
Maxtor DiamondMax 16
N/A
94.214
74.244
26.9%

Good performance is shown by the lower percentages. While the Maxtor DiamondMax 10 performed the best out of all the drives, its NCQ performance was slightly lower than with the feature disabled.

Multitasking Performance - Business Winstone 2004 Thermal and Acoustics
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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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