SiSoft Sandra

SiSoft Sandra has two tests to determine hard drive speed: read performance and write performance. I formatted the 7K1000 with one partition and ran both tests three times, to ensure I was getting consistent results. Here’s what Sandra came back with:

Read Performance:

• Drive Index 125 MB/s
• Random Access Time 13 ms
  

Write Performance:

• Drive Index 125 MB/s
• Random Access Time 5 ms

By way of comparison, the Seagate Barracuda I tested last year when hooked into a similar SATA 3.0 GB/s set up returned a Drive Index of 70 MB/s and a Random Access Time of 14 ms in the read test, suggesting a nice performance upgrade with this new drive – maybe that 32 MB cache is worth the price.

Passmark Software Performance Test

I like to run two different benchmarks on a hard drive to compare results. My usual secondary option doesn’t work on Vista, so I found a new program: Passmark Software’s PerformanceTest. PerformanceTest runs one complete read and write test on the drive and returns four results, as seen below:

Sequential Read: 69.3 MB/s
Sequential Write: 62.8 MB/s
Random Seek + RW: 3.87 MB/s
Disk Mark: 491.9

According to PassMark’s documentation, the sequential read and write tests create a 200 MB file and read it back in 16 KB blocks, while the Random Seek + RW test combines the two tests with a random seek test to test out the drive’s seek time. The Disk Mark is PerformanceMark’s overall evaluation of the hard disk. The value is relative, so there’s no top level of the scale; it’s best as a comparison with other drives. Because I’m sure you’re all curious, here are the results from the Seagate Barracuda drive:

Sequential Read: 63.9 MB/s
Sequential Write: 58.8 MB/s
Random Seek + RW: 2.73 MB/s
Disk Mark: 453.5