Test Setup

Testing hard disks can be difficult, especially when using such a hard disk intensive operative system as Windows Vista 64-bit - give it thirty seconds and it's spun your hard drives up to handily defragment or index them - not exactly what you want when trying to ascertain a hard drive's peak performance.

To get a decent idea of drive performance in a variety of real world circumstances we tested each independently using a variety of tools. HDTach 3.040 gives us a good idea of theoretical drive performance, FC-Test’s intensive file transfer abilities give us a good idea of real world drive performance.

We also wanted to see if these disks provide any real world performance advantages, so cloned an install of Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit onto each and then timed the resulting boot times before also timing Crysis load times.

In order to maintain good benchmarking practice, each test was performed five times with the highest and lowest scores discarded and the remaining three results averaged.

Common Components

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 (operating at 3.00GHz – 9x333MHz);
  
• Gigabyte GA-X38-DS5 motherboard (Intel X38 Express);
  
• ATI Radeon HD 4850 (625/1,986MHz);
  
• 2x 1GB OCZ FlexXLC PC-6400 memory (operating in dual-channel at DDR2-800 with 5-5-5-15-2T timings);
  
• PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750W PSU;
  
• Windows Vista Home Premium x86-64;
  
• Catalyst 8.11 WHQL
  
• Intel inf 8.3.0 WHQL