Hitachi Deskstar 7K160
SATA II hard disk drive7200 rpm, 160 GB
Evaluating hard drive in relation to games and of course, game performance is pretty difficult, but not impossible. It's just a question of common sense - when is the hard drive used by games? The answer of course is when the game is reading data like when it loads a level, and saves data, like when you're saving a save game (or the game saves an autosave / checkpoints). There is another possibility, texture / object loads during gameplay, but that's much harder to predict and reproduce. They are also signs that the system doesn't have enough RAM so the operating system has to swap memory from RAM to virtual memory. As our article, "The Quest of Lag Free Gaming" Part 1 and Part 2 showed, in these instances, it's much better to add more RAM than it is to get a faster hard drive.
From our experience with that article, we saw indications that hard drive performance does matter in the two example instances - loads and writes, particularly loads. So, having a faster hard drive in addition to a bigger one is one of the concerns of many users and gamers today. A bigger, faster hard drive will hold more game installations, downloaded patches and even ISO images for virtual drives and also allows the system to access these files much faster - contributing to a better gaming experience though not necessarily as quantifiable as frame rate.
There is a relatively cheap way to have both capacity and higher transfer rate. Most motherboards and chipsets come with built in RAID 0 / 1 support these days. So, in addition to testing single drive performance, gamers will often pay attention to RAID 0 (stripe) performance. Today, we're going to run these tests on the Hitachi Deskstar 7K160. For informations purposes, we will be comparing the results with our mainstay hard drive of choice, the Maxtor DiamondMax 10. For RAID 0 array test, we left the default NForce RAID IDE settings at their default settings (optimal).
Overview
We usually don't run synthetic benchmarks, but in this case we feel it's important to pinpoint areas we want to focus on. Since we're focusing mainly on gaming performance, we're going to focus on the Hitachi Deskstar 7K160's read performance. In that regard, it would be very helpful to know the factors involved such as transfer rates, access time and CPU utilizations. Since measuring these aspects of storages is nearly impossible (or at least very hard to do) with real world games, thus the use of synthetic benchmarks. Rest assured though, these synthetic benchmarks are not the main influencing factor in our evaluation. We will still rely on games for that purpose. Let's take a look at the results.HD Tach
The Hitachi Deskstar 7K160 is definitely faster than our DiamondMax 10. Having SATA II means burst speed are much higher, in fact it's almost twice what our DiamondMax 10 can offer. Sequential read and write are also significantly higher and that's a good thing. With fairly about the same access time and CPU utilization, no doubt you'll appreciate the additional speed and space. Overall, the Hitachi Deskstar is the better drive here.
With RAID 0 (stripe), you practically almost double your hard drives' transfer rate for both read and write. Burst speed jumped so high, that the array of two Hitachi Deskstar can offer transfer rate slightly higher than what you get from a single SCSI Ultra 320. Our two DiamondMax 10 also got a healthy dose of additional transfer rate, but it's still far from the levels of the two Hitachi Deskstar. However, using a RAID array is not without some disadvantages. According to this test, CPU utilization are much higher - jumping from 2 - 4 % to around 13 %.
However, there seems to be something quite odd about the two Hitachi Deskstar RAID 0 array results. Read transfer rate didn't kick in until we get to around 125 GB and write transfer rates are really odd, to say the least. As you can see, we don't have such a problem with our DiamondMax 10 drives. This is probably why both the average read and write speed from these two arrays are very close, in fact write is better with the DiamondMax 10 array.
Looking closer at the results, even with this odd behavior, the Hitachi Deskstar RAID 0 array is still able to offer read higher and close to the two DiamondMax stripe array. That explains the still higher average read from the Hitachi Deskstar array results - 116 MB/s compared to 97 MB/s. Slighty lower access time no doubt also contributed to this fact.
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