A note on the testing
Product reps have a habit of freaking out whenever we throw an orange into an apples-to-apples comparison, but that's not going to stop me from benching the Barracuda 7200.7 against Maxtor's DiamondMax Plus 9 7,200RPM drive and Western Digital's 10K RPM Raptor WD360GD.

It's important to understand that the Raptor and Barracuda aren't direct competitors; the Barracuda is designed for desktop PCs, while the Raptor was built for high-end workstations and servers. The Raptor has a 2,800RPM spindle speed advantage over our 7,200RPM drives, which means it should be faster in the majority of our tests. The Raptor is also limited to 36 and 74GB capacities, and it's quite a bit more expensive than Seagate and Maxtor's 7,200RPM offerings.

Since enthusiasts have never been shy about using workstation gear in their personal systems, it doesn't seem right to exclude the Raptor because marketing managers define the drive's target market differently. Just keep in mind that it's an enterprise-class product with an enterprise-worthy price tag.

Our testing methods
All tests were run three times, and their results were averaged, using the following test system.

  System
ProcessorIntel Pentium 4 2.26GHz
Front-side bus533MHz (4x133MHz)
MotherboardTyan Trinity GC-SL
ChipsetServerWorks Grand Champion SL
North bridgeServerWorks CMIC-SL
South bridgeServerWorks CSB5
Memory size512MB (1 DIMM)
Memory typeCAS 2.5 PC2100 ECC DDR SDRAM
GraphicsATI Rage XL
Storage Controllers

SIIG Serial ATA PCI

Storage Driver

Silicon Image 1.0.0.47

Storage

Western Digital Raptor WD360GD 37GB
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 120GB
Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 120GB

Operating SystemWindows XP Professional SP1

The SIIG Serial ATA RAID card was used in the motherboard's PCI-X slot and had the entire PCI-X bus to itself throughout testing. Though the board's PCI-X slots support 64-bit cards at speeds up to 133MHz, the SIIG card tops out at 32 bits and 66MHz, which should be more than adequate for our single-disk tests.

A special thanks goes out to the Computer Repair Shop for kicking in the Western Digital Raptor WD360GD we used for testing

We used the following versions of our test applications:

The test systems' Windows desktop was set at 1024x768 in 32-bit color at a 75Hz 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.