Seagate Barracuda 7200.8: 400GBs with NCQ

Overall System Performance - SYSMark 2004

SYSMark 2004 is divided into two separate suites: Internet Content Creation and Office Productivity. What makes SYSMark an ideal hard disk benchmark is that its scores are totals of response times, meaning that the benchmark measures how long the system takes to respond to a task (e.g. how long before a search and replace is completed after it is initiated) and sums up all such response times to generate a score. This score is generated for six total subcategories: three under Internet Content Creation and three under Office Productivity.

For the most part, SYSMark is CPU/platform bound, but we will see some variations in performance according to disk speed. At the same time, there are a couple of benchmarks within SYSMark that are heavily disk dependent.

Internet Content Creation Performance

Our results showed very little difference in the performance of the competitors; not enough to rule out margin of error in the Content Creation part of SYSMark 2004. The scores for the majority of drives landed between 180-183, which does not illustrate too well the drive that performs better than the rest.

Office Productivity Performance

SYSMark's Office Productivity suite consists of three tests, the first of which is the Communication test. The Communication test consists of the following:

"The user receives an email in Outlook 2002 that contains a collection of documents in a zip file. The user reviews his email and updates his calendar while VirusScan 7.0 scans the system. The corporate web site is viewed in Internet Explorer 6.0. Finally, Internet Explorer is used to look at samples of the web pages and documents created during the scenario."

Though SYSMark 2004 contains two other tests in its Office Productivity benchmarks, we saw very little difference when testing the hard disk drives, since Document Creation and Data Analysis are more dependant on the CPU rather than hard disk speed.

The Communication test, on the other hand, is disk dependant, which shows in our results. With Western Digital's Raptor ruling the charts so far, the 400GB 7200.8 just can't seem to keep up with the other drives in this scenario, coming in at 7th place, below the 120GB 7200.7 with a score of 182.