Western Digital Raptor Preview: 10,000RPM & Serial ATA

Content Creation Performance

In order to measure Content Creation performance we used Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2003 and Internet Content Creation SYSMark 2002. First we'll start off with the Winstone benchmark, which is best described by its creators at Veritest:

Multimedia Content Creation Winstone is a system-level, application-based benchmark that measures a PC's overall performance when running top, Windows-based, 32-bit, multimedia content creation applications on Windows 2000 (SP2 or higher), Windows 98, Windows ME, and Windows XP. Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2003 uses the following applications:

Adobe® Photoshop® 7.0
Adobe® Premiere® 6.0
Macromedia® Director 8.5.1
Macromedia® Dreamweaver 4
Microsoft® Windows MediaTM Encoder 7.01.00.3055
Netscape® 6.2.3
NewTek's LightWave® 7.5
Sonic Foundry® Sound Forge® 6.0

Following the lead of real users, Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2003 keeps multiple applications open at once and switches among those applications. Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2003 is a single large test that runs the above applications through a series of scripted activities and returns a single score. Those activities focus on what we call "hot spots," periods of activity that make your PC really work--the times where you're likely to see an hourglass or a progress bar

We start out by isolating all of the disk accesses that take place during a run of the benchmark and running them on each of the individual drives:

Content Creation Winstone 2003 Disk Performance Performance in I/O Operations per Second (Higher is better) Western Digital Caviar WD1200JB (120GB PATA) IBM Deskstar 180GXP (185.2GB PATA) Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 (80GB PATA) Maxtor Atlas 10K IV (36GB U320 SCSI) Seagate Cheetah 10K.6 (36.7GB U320 SCSI) Seagate Barracuda ATA V (120GB PATA) Seagate Barracuda Serial ATA V (80GB SATA) Western Digital Raptor WD360 (36.7GB SATA) 379 364 361 334 334 296 287 209 | 0 | 76 | 152 | 227 | 303 | 379 | 455

Let's start at the top of the chart, with the WD1200JB, 180GXP and DiamondMax Plus 9; all three of these top performers are conventional parallel ATA drives, and all perform within 5% of one another. Keep in mind that we're only talking about disk performance here, and if they perform within 5% of each other in this test then their real-world performance difference will be negligible.

The two SCSI drives are basically identical in performance, and aren't optimized for the sort of usage models exemplified by Winstone or SYSMark for that matter. The firmware and the logic of most 10,000 RPM SCSI drives are tuned for enterprise and high-end workstation applications, not the sort of content creation models we're showing off here. The fastest drive in this test (WD1200JB) manages to outperform the two SCSI contenders by around 13%, which just goes to show you that SCSI isn't always best suited for desktop applications.

Towards the bottom of the comparison we have the two Seagate Barracuda solutions, which are basically identical drives although they differ in interface and capacity. The two perform quite similarly to one another, but are also the slowest out of the PATA/SATA pack, excluding of course the trailing drive - the Western Digital Raptor.

The Raptor is outperformed by the WD1200JB by no less than 81% in this I/O test, and manages to be the poorest performing drive out of this entire group. It is possible that the beta nature of our test drive is responsible for this horrid performance, however at the same time Western Digital will have to improve performance considerably between now and when the Raptor ships in order to make up for this deficit.

The synthetic numbers are nice and all, but what does this translate into in terms of real-world performance? Instead of just running a trace of the disk accesses in Content Creation Winstone 2003, we ran the actual Winstone 2003 benchmark to see what these numbers mean:

Content Creation Winstone 2003 System Performance Performance in Winstones (Higher is better) Western Digital Caviar WD1200JB (120GB PATA) IBM Deskstar 180GXP (185.2GB PATA) Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 (80GB PATA) Maxtor Atlas 10K IV (36GB U320 SCSI) Seagate Barracuda ATA V (120GB PATA) Seagate Barracuda Serial ATA V (80GB SATA) Seagate Cheetah 10K.6 (36.7GB U320 SCSI) Western Digital Raptor WD360 (36.7GB SATA) 48.7 48.6 48.5 48.4 48.4 48.2 47.6 46.0 | 0 | 10 | 19 | 29 | 39 | 49 | 6

The first thing you'll notice is that other than the Cheetah and the Raptor, all of the other drives offer about the same level of performance. In fact, the performance of the top 6 contenders varies by just over 1%; you'd be fine going with any of these drives and you wouldn't notice any real-world difference in performance between them.

The Raptor is outdone by the top performing Caviar (WD1200JB) by just over 5%; to put this in perspective, the difference in performance between a Raptor and the Caviar would be almost identical to the performance difference between a 2.66GHz Pentium 4 and a 3.06GHz Pentium 4 (HT) in this test. This sort of a performance difference isn't huge and will be mostly unnoticeable, but why settle for lesser performance if you are paying more for it? The Raptor shows no advantage here.