Hitachi vs. Western Digital vs. Seagate: A Battle of the Mammoths
by Purav Sanghani on December 2, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Real World Tests - Game Level Load Times
Our Game Level Loading Time tests include two of the latest games: Doom 3 and Half-Life 2. Because of their high resolution textures and the large levels, the loading time for the levels of each game are long enough to help show a difference between each drive.
We have also included an older strategy game, Command & Conquer: Generals, because of its longer level load times as well. Though the game is a couple of years old, it still proves to be a good measure of data loading performance.
Our Game Level Loading Time tests include two of the latest games: Doom 3 and Half-Life 2. Because of their high resolution textures and the large levels, the loading time for the levels of each game are long enough to help show a difference between each drive.
We have also included an older strategy game, Command & Conquer: Generals, because of its longer level load times as well. Though the game is a couple of years old, it still proves to be a good measure of data loading performance.
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Visual - Saturday, December 3, 2005 - link
i cant imagine what error would hang my drive for 8 seconds :/ and if it really happened, even in recoverable error, i'd not trust that drive again anyway. so it'd be better to mark it "failed"Lakeshow - Saturday, December 3, 2005 - link
Yeah I read that article on storagereview.com couple days after I got my WD4000YR and it kind of bothers me.Oh well, what are you gonna do? I absolutely love this drive. I can only hope this drive will live until my next voluntary upgrade.
Lifted - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
The HD Tach screenshots say "for non-commercial or evaluation use only, see license agreement."Hmmmmm. Anandtech is non-commercial?
Gannon - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
I'd like to see more tests done on drives that are at least 80% full because a lot of us pack our drives full of stuff and the performance we end up getting is when we've filled it. While these tests are good and all, I think they inflate the actual scores of how a drive is really used. No drive sits with just XP and a game or two and a couple of test files, that bias's the tests toward unrealistic use of how hard disks are used, especially big ones over 160GB. I fill my drives regularly and I have over 800GB needless to say I'm backing up stuff to DVD's just to have enough space to perform other operations.WileCoyote - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
Why does everyone want Anandtech to benchmark their current system? Run your own benchmark if you want to know the speed of your hard-drive/computer. I think the articles here are perfect - they help me decide what to purchase in the future. I don't need an article to make me feel good about what I already have. I like the current format of articles that educate me on my next purchase.johnsonx - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
time to cut down on the pron addictionOlaf van der Spek - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
> We were also surprised to see the WD4000YR perform so well, since it is using the 1 st generation 1.5Gb/sec interface.That's a joke, right?
I hope you weren't really expecting a significant performance improvement from a faster interface (300 mbyte/s instead of 150 mbyte/s while HDD's are more near 75 mbyte/s and only during seqential access).
bob661 - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
I think the interface increases benefit RAID performance more than singledrive performance.Olaf van der Spek - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
I don't think so, as (without involvement of port multipliers) SATA is a point to point architecture.yacoub - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
Or you can go buy a pair of 200GB Samsung SpinPoint SP2004C drives for under $100 each and have a much quieter drive setup. :)