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Testing The Momentus 7200.2
To test the performance of the Seagate 160GB Momentus 7200.2 hard drive, we turned to the venerable Disk WinBench 99 Version 2.0. However, WinBench 99 seemed to have some issues with Windows Vista, or the current Vista driver for the SATA controller. It would register a SetFilePointer error in the Disk Access Time test. So, no valid Disk Access Time result could be obtained.
Categories |
Fileset |
Total Size (bytes) |
Documents |
2004 HTML files 41 PPT files 124 DOC files 162 XLS files |
200,007,960 |
Movies - DivX |
6 DIVX files |
200,228,230 |
HDTach 3.040 was not Vista-compatible, so we did not include it in the tests. On the other hand, we added new write tests, using two of our Compression Comparison Guide filesets.
The Documents fileset was chosen to represent small files transfers, while the Movies - DivX fileset was chosen to test large file transfers. The small files transfer test will stress the hard drive controller while the large file transfer test will focus on the maximum sustained transfer rate we can expect from the hard drives.
The Test Bed
| Processor | Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 ES - 2.4 GHz core clock - 4MB L2 cache |
|
| Motherboard | ASUS P5N32-SLI (nForce 590 SLI) | |
| Memory | Two G.Skill 1GB PC2-6400 DDR2 memory modules |
|
| Graphics Card | NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GT | |
| Hard Drives | 40GB Fujitsu MHT2040AT ATA-100 hard drive |
|
| Operating System | Microsoft Windows Vista | |
| Power Supply | Mushkin 580W PSU |
Hard Drive Details
Hard Drives |
Form Factor
|
Spindle Speed
|
Buffer
|
Interface
|
40GB Fujitsu MHT2040AT |
2.5 " |
4200 RPM |
2 MB |
ATA-100 |
160GB Seagate Momentus 7200.2 |
2.5 " |
7200 RPM |
8 MB |
SATA 3Gb/s |
3.5 " |
7200 RPM |
16 MB |
SATA 3Gb/s |
|
3.5 " |
7200 RPM |
16 MB |
ATA-133
|
|
3.5 " |
7200 RPM |
16 MB |
SATA 3Gb/s
|
Platter Transfer Rate
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There appears to be about 30 different density zones. The outermost zone is about 12.5GB-wide and allowed a maximum platter transfer rate of 59.1MB/s. The lowest transfer rate was naturally seen at the last track, at 33MB/s.
The graph was pretty smooth, with only one large dip in the beginning. That could signify some damage on the outermost track, requiring the use of replacement sectors. Otherwise, the platter quality appears to be quite good.
