Seagate Barracuda 7200.8: 400GBs with NCQ

Pure Hard Disk Performance - IPEAK

We begin our usual hard disk drive test session with Intel's IPEAK benchmarking utility. We first run a trace capture on Winstone 2004's Business and Multimedia Content Creation benchmark runs to catch all of the IO operations that take place during each test. We then play each capture back using RankDisk which reports back to us a mean service time, or average time the drive takes to complete an IO operation.

Western Digital's Raptor tops this list as its 10,000RPM spindle produces the most IO operations of the group. The 7200.8 does not fare as well even with NCQ turned on.

Let's take a look at Content Creation performance.

The 400GB Barracuda performs much better here at 384 IO operations per second. Again, the Raptor takes first place at 490 operations per second.

The Barracuda's service times were some of the highest out of all the drives, even with NCQ on. Suprisingly, the 7200.7 came in higher than the majority of the newer drives on the list.