Testing (continued):
Real World Data Transfers:
Real world testing consisted of reading files from and writing files to the drives to be tested. A directory containing 150 sub-folders and a total of 2400 files was used for all transfers. The 750GB Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD7500AAKS drive was used as the original location of these files for writing tests, and was the final location for the reading tests. The files were generally small in size, and consisted of a mix of images, documents, html files, and other items that might represent a typical "My Documents" folder. The system was rebooted after each transfer test, and a separate directory was used on the 750GB drive for reading and writing. A digital stop watch was used to record the time it took to complete each transfer, and these values were used to calculate the effective data transfer rates shown below.
I have to admit that I was initially surprised by the performance of the 320GB Western Digital Scorpio, as the increase in performance was really quite impressive. The increase might not look huge, but as a percentage it is really much quicker than any other drive. The test was repeated and varied slightly in some iterations to confirm my results, and in some cases the results were even more impressive. While the drive did well in the synthetic benchmarks, real world performance really shows off the drive's potential.
Thermal Testing:
Thermal testing consisted of monitoring the idle and load temperatures of each drive using a digital thermometer while the drives were just placed in still air with no fans or housings to interfere with passive cooling. The idle condition consisted of the system just sitting at the Windows desktop with no extra applications running for a period of at least one hour. The load condition was created by running SiSoft Sandra's Physical Disks Benchmark in a looping pattern for a period of at least one hour.
Here we see an advantage most likely made possible by not bumping up the rotational speed to 7200RPM. The drive runs cool whether at idle or under a load, and it does so with minimal noise. It is hard to get a completely objective value for noise at these low levels, but the 320GB Scorpio is definitely one of the quietest drives tested.
