Perpendicular Recording - Testing

Testing

For testing I did some research into who is offering this type of hard drive. I found that only Seagate is offering a version to the public. There are a few other companies that are utilizing the technology, but it’s being used in other applications such as the iPod.

To see how well this hard drive does as far as performance, I will test a hard drive with this new technology against one without it. I will include some normal everyday events that would be influenced by hard drives, such as boot up time and game loading times, and also some benchmarks that will give us a more scientific look at this new technology. I will be comparing this new technology to an older technology in my Western Digital Caviar. Both are SATA 3.0Gb/s, 160GB and 160GB. This should be interesting.

The testing computer is made up of the following:

• Intel E2140

• EVGA 680i LT SLI

• (2) 1 GB G.Skill DDR2

• 8600 GT

• ePower Tiger 1200 watt

• Windows Vista

Boot up

This first test is really simple, but very real life. I hit the power button and hit my stopwatch. I stop when the computer is booted up. Remember this is Vista and not XP; the boot up times are going to be a lot slower in Vista than XP. Lower times are of course better.

We see no real gains here, I used a stopwatch and I consider this well within human error.

Doom 3

No we aren’t measuring the FPS in the same way we do every other time. This time we will benchmark how long it takes to load the game. I remember when games were on a single CD, then moved to a DVD. Now we see multi DVD games that take up lots of hard drive space. We are moving toward the need for faster hard drives. Lower times here are better.

Once again we see little difference in results. It's nothing that would justify saying there is any noticeable difference. I did a few other games and other benchmarks, like shutdown time, and all the results are close to this. It’s hard to see any difference. The differences in results are too close to rule out human error.

Next: Conclusion >>
 

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