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

Content Creation Performance (continued)

Next we have ICC SYSMark 2002; for this test we only have the trace results, but we're still able to draw some conclusions based on them. First, a listing of the programs used in the benchmark from the developers (BAPCo):

Adobe Photoshop® 6.01
Adobe Premiere® 6.0
Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 7.1
Macromedia Dreamweaver 4
Macromedia Flash 5

Internet Content Creation SYSMark 2002 Disk Performance Performance in I/O Operations per Second (Higher is better) Maxtor Atlas 10K IV (36GB U320 SCSI) Western Digital Caviar WD1200JB (120GB PATA) Seagate Cheetah 10K.6 (36.7GB U320 SCSI) Western Digital Raptor WD360 (36.7GB SATA) IBM Deskstar 180GXP (185.2GB PATA) Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 (80GB PATA) Seagate Barracuda Serial ATA V (80GB SATA) Seagate Barracuda ATA V (120GB PATA) 417 410 346 339 290 282 198 198 | 0 | 83 | 167 | 250 | 334 | 417 | 500

SYSMark 2002 (especially the ICC suite), is much more dependent on access time than the Winstone tests, and the benchmark itself happens to be relatively non-intensive when it comes to disk performance compared to Winstone. With that said, it's not a surprise that there's a shifting of the standings in these results as compared to what we saw with Content Creation Winstone.

The Caviar continues to hold a top spot, but this time is slightly outperformed by the Maxtor Atlas 10K IV. The Raptor manages to perform much more reasonably here, just barely losing out the third place spot to the Seagate Cheetah.

What's worth noting however is an 81% performance differential in the Winstone tests resulted in no more than a 5% difference in real world performance, so don't let the performance ranges here throw you off. A system using a 180GXP won't be 30% slower than a system using a WD1200JB.