iPEAK multitasking
We've developed a series of disk-intensive multitasking tests to highlight the impact of seek times and command queuing on hard drive performance. You can get the low-down on these iPEAK-based tests here. The mean service time of each drive is reported in milliseconds, with lower values representing better performance.

The one-point-five appears to be particularly adept at handling our iPEAK multitasking workloads. Despite the slow copy speeds we observed in FC-Test, the 'cuda comes out on top with our dual file copy workload. It also handles with aplomb workloads that include a compressed file creation as the primary task. However, the 1.5TB Barracuda isn't quite as quick when we switch to a compressed file extraction as the primary task.

In our second wave of iPEAK tests, the 7200.11 1.5TB continues to perform well. The drive is very competitive with workloads that involve an Outlook export task, and it's the fastest of the lot with workloads that include an Outlook PST import.

Even more impressive than the one-point-five's individual iPEAK performances is the drive's overall consistency. If you average the mean service times for each drive across all nine workloads, the 'cuda comes out ahead of the entire field, including the VelociRaptor.