Testing:
A handful of synthetic and real world tests were conducted on the
Western Digital Scorpio 250GB 2.5" SATA Hard Drive, using a test system with the following key components:
» Intel D840 3.2GHz Dual Core processor
» ABIT AW8D motherboard
» 2x 1GB
OCZ Technology PC2-6400 System Elite Dual Channel DDR2 memory
» 1x
Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD7500AAKS 750GB hard drive
» Windows XP Professional operating system (current)
Although this drive is intended for use with a laptop computer, the test system described above was used in order to have one platform with both PATA and SATA connections for comparison purposes.
As points of reference, three other laptop drives were tested along side the Scorpio 250GB; a
Seagate Momentus 7200.2 160GB SATA 3 Gbps unit, a
160GB Seagate Momentus 5400.3 PATA unit, and a
120GB Seagate Momentus 5400.2 PATA unit.
The 750GB Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD7500AAKS drive listed in the test system specifications contains the operating system, and is also where all benchmarking applications were launched from. The list below summarizes the tests to be conducted, and it should be noted that the test system was rebooted between the execution of every step:
» HD Tach 3.0.1.0 RW (Long Benchmark)
» SiSoft Sandra XI SP1 (Physical Disks Benchmark)
» Real World Data Transfers
» Thermal Testing
HD Tach 3.0.1.0 RW (Long Benchmark):
HD Tach is a benchmark dedicated to hard drive performance. It provides a few key pieces of information regarding the drive being tested, and the chart below details the reported CPU usage, the access time, the average read speed, and the burst (maximum) speed of the four drives being tested. Lower values are desirable for CPU usage and access time, while higher values are better for average read speed and burst speed.
From the data above we can see that the Scorpio reports the lowest CPU usage of the group and has the slowest access time, both by a very small margin. While there is no way the SATA 1.5 Gbps Scorpio can compete with the SATA 3 Gbps Momentus 7200.2 drive when it comes to burst speed, the more telling average read speed values are nearly identical. In every day use, the speed difference will probably go unnoticed.
