Image processing

Adobe Photoshop

ACDSee PowerPack

WorldBench's Photoshop test doesn't appear to take advantage of faster drives, but the suite's ACDSee workload does. In that test, the 7200.11 finds itself hanging towards the back of the pack, only beating its 7200.10 predecessor and the Barracuda ES. To be fair, the new 'cuda isn't far behind the Deskstar 7K1000 and Caviar GP. It is more than 20 seconds slower than the Caviar SE16 and RE2, though.

Multitasking and office applications

Microsoft Office

Mozilla

Mozilla and Windows Media Encoder

Scores don't vary much across WorldBench's office and multitasking tests. We'll revisit multitasking performance with more demanding disk-intensive workloads in a moment.

Other applications

WinZip

Nero

Nero and WinZip give the 'cuda a chance to stretch its legs, but the drive comes up a little short in both tests. The 7200.11 loses ground to all its direct competitors here, and can't even match the performance standard set by a Barracuda 7200.10 that's roughly a year and a half old. It looks like these tests are what's dragging down the 'cuda's overall WorldBench score.