WinBench 99

High-End Disk Playback : Microstation

Like AVS and FrontPage, I doubt that a CAD application like Microstation is a disk intensive application. It is, however, a CPU intensive application. So we see results that are almost similar to that of FrontPage 98.

High-End Disk Playback : Photoshop 4.0

Now, we all know how disk-intensive Photoshop is. Take, for example, the editing of a 50 MB file. Photoshop actually uses at least three times as much hard disk space for paging. Add in the text, raster or even mask layers that you may use and all that increases the amount of paging done by Photoshop. In other words, Photoshop really tortures the hard disk drive!

This time, we can actually see the advantage of RAID 0 compared to the other setups. However, RAID 0 with stripe size of 64 KB seemed to perform very badly. Again, it's amazing to see that hardware spanning actually performs better compared to software span and also normal single hard disk drive setup! Mirroring also does not seem to perform that badly, being on par with a normal hard disk drive, and yet with the added advantage of data redundancy.

Another interesting thing in this test is that RAID 0 with large stripe sizes (>128 KB) seem to be perform rather well. In short, when dealing with large files, a large stripe size helps.

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