What test shows how a good a HD is in multitasking on storagereview.com when they review HDs?

[WyteWatt]

Ok i am talking about like lets say you want to burn a cd, download two linux isos at the same time, surf the internet with 5 IE windows open, trillian loaded, and installing a game all at the same time. What test on the reviews would show you how good each hard drive does on this kind of heavy multitasking please?

The reason i want to know this is because i want to know what IDE HD is the best at doing a lot of heavy multitasking without slowing down to much. I know all hard drives will slow down some while doing all of this maybe at the same time. Inless its better to wait and get a WD Raptor or SCSI HD sense it may beable to handle this heavy multitasking a little better maybe. I have no idea sense i haven't tried them in person vs a IDE HD.

Thanks.

 

[Lord Evermore]

The drive itself pretty much doesn't care about multitasking. It's the OS, controller, and drivers that matter. All a drive does is accept commands and transfer data.

If a drive has low seek times and average throughput, it would probably provide good performance for you since the downloading isn't going to be a high data rate, and the burning isn't all that high in comparison to a hard drive, but every time the drive has to change the head position to write the data for a different app, other apps stop being able to transfer data for a moment. Poor drivers can cause this to just destroy performance. No single test is going to tell you how it does in multi-tasking since it's so dependent on other factors, and would also depend on where exactly your data is located on the disk (how far the heads have to move for the different apps). High transfer rate and low seek times are what you want in any case.

 

[zephyrprime]

Poor drivers can cause this to just destroy performance.

Drivers are hardly involved with hard drives. Yeah, yeah, I know about the intel accelerator drivers but even they don't do very much compared to, say, a video card.

In discussions at storagereview, it seems like the biggest impediment to windows disk performance is windows' read ahead policy and write combining policy (does it even have one?). Not much can be done except to buy a scsi drive. The thing is though, Lord Evermore is right with regards to the relative demandingness of the apps described. The only thing you've described that's actually demandind is installing a game. It's the only thing what might cause a buffer underrun for you.

 

[TROGDORdBURNINATOR]

Drivers are hardly involved with hard drives. Yeah, yeah, I know about the intel accelerator drivers but even they don't do very much compared to, say, a video card.

Bzzt. Wrong. IDE drivers are critically important. Poor ones can bring a system to a crawl. Nforce and Intel chipset systems have often been observed to be much snappier than any other IDE-based system because of their excellent IDE drivers and controller.

Anyway, I just picked up a Western Digital 80 GB special Edition (8meg cache) and I find it to be much more responsive (especially when multitasking) than my WD 80 GB non-special Edition. Highly recommended.

 

[Lord Evermore]

Microsoft's generic drivers for the nforce2 chipset result in extremely high CPU usage and lower performance than expected. But then, nvidia's drivers result in problems burning CDs. Don't know if all that's been resolved yet.

Any hardware with bad drivers will have bad performance. There may be a point where you have adequate drivers and more improvement is only slight, but it's quite easy to get much worse.