| Article Index |
|---|
| 400GB SATA-II Challenge - Seagate vs. Western Digital |
| Page 2 - PCMark05 |
| Page 3 - SiSoft Sandra |
| Page 4 - HD Tune |
| All Pages |
The most popular and best value for money
section of the desktop drive market today is the 300-500GB segment. And with that in mind we thought we’d take a look at two 400GB stable mates from Western Digital and Seagate and see which gives the best bang for your
buck.
The drives we’re looking at today are the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 400GB SATA-II-300 (Model ST3400620AS), and the Western Digital Caviar SE16 400GB SATA-II-300 (Model WD4000AAKS). Both drives have very similar specifications, both operate at 7,200rpm, use the Serial ATA-II interface, have a 16MB cache buffer and both are very low noise, almost silent in fact. Both the Seagate and Western Digital sell online for just under AU$180, so the only way to really differentiate between the two is on their performance.
Before we start with the performance tests, it should be noted that the Seagate drive does have NCQ, Native Command Queuing, and while this won’t (or shouldn’t) affect raw data throughput tests, it may affect other tests that involve multiple and random file read/write operations. I guess we’ll have to wait and see if it actually makes a difference though.
Another point to note is that this Seagate drive, like most other Seagate SATA-II drives, is by default set to operate at SATA-150 speeds, you have to remove a jumper at the rear of the drive to enable SATA-II-300 speeds, so be sure you do this if you get yourself a Seagate SATA-II drive.
The Test Machine:
- ASUS P5N32-E SLI nForce 680i Motherboard
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 CPU
- 2GB (2 x 1GB Sticks) Corsair PC2-8500 Twin2X DDR2 RAM
- Antec Basiq 500W ATX PSU
- Western Digital 250GB Caviar SE HDD (System drive, also used for comparison) - WD2500JS
We will be using the following benchmark software for testing the drives:
- PCMark05 (HDD Tests Only) – http://www.futuremark.com/
- SiSoft Sandra - http://www.sisoftware.co.uk/
- HD Tune - http://www.hdtune.com/
The First Test: PCMark05
PCMark05 has 5 different Hard Drive tests that it performs, all of which are designed to test the drives in a real-world environment instead of just seeing how fast it can write a big chunk of data. All the tests were performed twice for accuracy with the average result used as the final data.
As we can see from the above graphs, both 400GB drives have a significant speed advantage over the older generation 250GB drive, which is to be expected as technologies improve and the bit density on the drive platters gets higher, which means the head can read/write more data in a given number of rotations.
The graphs also show the two 400GB drives tussling for first place, with the Seagate drive faster in the Windows XP start-up simulation and the virus scan, but falling behind the Western Digital on the other three tests. This could be a result of the Seagate’s NCQ ability.
Next: SiSoft Sandra
The SiSoft Sandra tests we perform on the drives are the Physical Disk benchmark (Read Performance Only) and the File System Benchmark, both of which measure the total throughput of the drives as well as give a record of their latency/random access times for the different tests.
As we can see in the above graphs, the Western Digital appears to be the better drive when it comes to raw data throughput, however the Seagate has slightly lower seek times, which would help explain why it was better at a few of the PCMark tests even though the Western Digital appears to have faster total throughput.
Next: HD Tune Benchmark
The HD Tune benchmark tests the transfer rate across the entire face of the disc platters, starting from the outside and working in (speed shown by blue line). The access times are also tested at each point, and measures the time taken for the heads to get from their idle position at the outside of the platter/disc, to seek to the desired position, this time will increase as the test moves further towards the inside of the platters (shown by the yellow dots).
Firstly, the Western Digital 250GB (WD2500JS)
Second, the Western Digital 400GB (WD4000AAKS)
Finally, the Seagate 400GB (ST3400620AS)
From the above images, we see that the performance of both Western Digital hard drives starts to fall at a predictable rate straight away, whereas the Seagate drive plateau’s at the beginning and only starts to fall off around the 50% mark. All things being equal between the drives, this shouldn’t happen, the Seagate should fall off from the start just like the Western Digital, this is possibly a limitation of the circuitry on the Seagate drive not being able to process the data at the desired speed.
Both drives have a similar speed at the 100% mark of the test, with the Seagate having an ever so slightly better access time according to this test, but overall the Western Digital 400GB drive has shown itself to be the much faster drive in terms of its overall transfer rate.
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Conclusion:
Both the Seagate and Western Digital 400GB drives have their strengths and weaknesses in different areas, as is shown by some of these tests. Overall the Western Digital has superior throughput speed while the Seagate has faster access times, so it does make it difficult to pick a real winner.
While I could live happily with either (or both) of these drives in my own PC, if I had to choose just one, I would have to go with the Western Digital, its performance advantage is simply too big to ignore, in my opinion it clearly offers the best bang for your buck.
These products can be purchased online at www.techbuy.com.au
