Test notes
Today we've pitted the SATA25 against 7,200-RPM mobile drives from Seagate and Hitachi, and Super Talent's old IDE Flash solid-state drive. We've also thrown in the latest 3.5" drives from Hitachi, Maxtor, Samsung, Seagate, and Western Digital. These 3.5" drives aren't natural competitors for the SATA25, but we're curious to see how SSD performance compares with the fastest desktop drives on the market.
We use a common hard drive test rig here at TR, so all the results are comparable to those in our last major hard drive review, and even our mobile hard drive round-ups.
Our testing methods
All tests were run three times, and their results were averaged, using the following test system.
| Processor | Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.4GHz |
| System bus | 800MHz (200MHz quad-pumped) |
| Motherboard | Asus P5WD2 Premium |
| Bios revision | 0422 |
| North bridge | Intel 955X MCH |
| South bridge | Intel ICH7R |
| Chipset drivers |
Chipset 7.2.1.1003 AHCI/RAID 5.1.0.1022 |
| Memory size | 1GB (2 DIMMs) |
| Memory type | Micron DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz |
| CAS latency (CL) | 3 |
| RAS to CAS delay (tRCD) | 3 |
| RAS precharge (tRP) | 3 |
| Cycle time (tRAS) | 8 |
| Audio codec | ALC882D |
| Graphics | Radeon X700 Pro 256MB with CATALYST 5.7 drivers |
| Hard drives |
Western Digital Caviar SE16 750GB SATA Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750GB SATA Western Digital Raptor X 150GB SATA Western Digital Raptor WD1500ADFD 150GB SATA Western Digital Caviar RE2 500GB SATA Seagate Barracuda ES 750GB SATA Samsung SpinPoint T 400GB SATA Maxtor DiamondMax 11 500GB SATA Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 1TB SATA Seagate Momentus 7200.1 100GB SATA Hitachi Travelstar 7K100 100GB SATA Super Talent IDE Flash 8GB ATA Super Talent SATA25 128GB SATA |
| OS | Windows XP Professional |
| OS updates | Service Pack 2 |
Thanks to the folks at Newegg for hooking us up with the DiamondMax 11 we used for testing.
Our test system was powered by OCZ PowerStream power supply units. The PowerStream was one of our Editor's Choice winners in our last PSU round-up.
We used the following versions of our test applications:
- WorldBench 5.0
- Intel IOMeter v2004.07.30
- Xbit Labs File Copy Test v1.0 beta 13
- TCD Labs HD Tach v3.01
- Far Cry v1.3
- DOOM 3
- Intel iPEAK Storage Performance Toolkit 3.0
The test systems' Windows desktop was set at 1280x1024 in 32-bit color at an 85Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests.
All the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.
