| Seagate Barracuda 3TB Hard Drive ST3000DM001 |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Storage | |
| Written by Olin Coles | |
| Tuesday, 01 November 2011 | |
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Page 8 of 10
EVEREST Disk BenchmarkMany enthusiasts are familiar with the Lavalys EVEREST benchmark suite (now named AIDA), but very few are aware of the Disk Benchmark tool available inside the program. The EVEREST Disk Benchmark performs linear read and write bandwidth tests on each drive, and can be configured to use file chunk sizes up to 1MB (which speeds up testing and minimizes jitter in the waveform). EVEREST Disk Benchmark does not require a partition to be present for testing, so all of our benchmarks are completed prior to drive formatting. Linear disk benchmarks are superior bandwidth speed tools in my opinion, because they scan from the first physical sector to the last. A side affect of many linear write-performance test tools is that the data is erased as it writes to every sector on the drive. These high-capacity storage products were tested with EVEREST Disk Benchmark and connected to the Intel SATA 6Gb/s controller to use a 1MB block size option. Because these hard drives offer 3000 gigabytes of data storage capacity, the test run took a very long time to complete. Nevertheless, the waveform performance chart illustrates data speed stability across every platter. Ironically, both tests resulted in identical average and maximum speeds. This test finishes in a draw, with no advantage given to either drive.
Seagate Barracuda XT 3TB Hard Drive ST33000651AS (Five-Platter)
Seagate Barracuda 3TB Hard Drive ST3000DM001 (Three-Platter)In the next section we use PCMark Vantage to test real-world performance...
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Comments
One of the things I wanted to do was test using real files. I chose to use a folder with 6GB of jpg/RAW/and video files. I then compressed that entire folder into a solid RAR archive and tested with that as well. Synthetic benches are fun, but real world file transfers can tell a different story.
All in all a tight review, but I'm wondering why you didn't test the drive using real files, say reading from an SSD and writing to it?
Still, I get your point, and I also wish there was a way to use a standardized set of test files, that everyone could agree on.
I suppose you could save those same files and use them to test other drives also, albeit, with the same drive and rig set up. Or, one could test a number of drives using the same files on any rig, as long as the host drive, to prevent bottlenecking, is faster than the drive being tested. That SSD Olin tested recently would have been a good contender for the host drive, since it is the fastest SSD currently commercially available to the public.