Need help with new WD1200JB (120GB, 8MB Cache)

[Hobbes28]

I just got a new retail Western Digital 120GBSE (8MB Cache) Hard Drive and I was wondering what would be the best way to verify the performance of the drive compared to a Western Digital 120GB (2MB Cache) already installed in my rig. Right now I'm using HDTach v2.61 and I really don't see much difference in the benchmarks. Both drives are connected to a Promise Ultra100 TX2, each on a channel by themselves (only drive on each channel). Average score for both is around 8.7ms access time, 79k on read burst and 49k on the overall with around 4 -5% CPU usage. I really expected to "see" more of a difference and the "feel" of the new drive doesn't seem as fast as I expected.

I would really appreciate some feedback...

Thanks...

 

[Mavrick007]

Go to Storagereview.com and find out what benches they run.

The use of an external controller and driver make it more difficult to give average write access times due to not being able to disable write caching.

 

[Pariah]

That's because you bought into all the hype surrounding the drive which differs from reality. The 2 drives should perform identically in HDtach. HDtach measures access time and STR which are both lowlevel benchmarks that eliminate cache from the equation. The 8MB version will benchmark quite well in application benchmarks, but odds are you're not actually going to notice any difference during normal usage. Like you I also own a 120JB and BB, and I haven't come across any situations where I could tell the drives apart.

 

[Whitedog]

I have a 1200JB too... just got it a week ago.

I put my scsi outfit in my server. I was running prior to the 1200JB a Baracuda 7200RPM scsi drive w/2MB cache. I believe the 1200JB performs better in all honestly. Though I still believe SCSI is more "reliable", the IDE drive is a good solid drive in performance (and hopefully reliability).

I had a couple of 10k drive I wanted to hook up together on my server is why I moved the baracuda over to it. Besides, I needed more disk space. Those SCSI drives are just too small