Western Digital WD7500AAKS 750GB SATA HDD
Test System and SiSoft SANDRA
When testing the Western Digital WD7500AAKS SATA HDD, we used an Athlon 64 4600+ processor on a DFI LANParty NF4 SLI-DR motherboard. We also used 1GB of low latency Corsair DDR (TWINX1024-3200XL) and a 120GB Maxtor SATA hard drive for the operating system drive. The WD7500AAKS was compared to the following drives: a 500GB Western Digital WD5000KS Caviar SE16, a 750GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10, a 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 and a 500GB Hitachi Deskstar 7K500.
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Motherboard - Video Card - Memory - Audio - Hard Drives -
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Hardware Used:
AMD Athlon 64 4600+ DFI LANParty NF4 SLI-DR nForce4 SLI chipset GeForce 8800 GTX 1024MB Corsair XMS PC3200 RAM CAS 2 Integrated on board Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750GB - 7,200RPM - SATA 3Gb/s Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 500GB - 7,200RPM - SATA 3Gb/s Hitach Deskstar 7K500 500GB - 7,200RPM - SATA 3Gb/s Western Digital WD5000KS 500GB - 7,200RPM - SATA 3Gb/s Western Digital WD7500AAKS 750GB - 7,200RPM - SATA 3Gb/s |
Operating System - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Video Drivers - |
Relevant Software:
Windows XP Professional SP2 nForce Drivers v6.86 DirectX 9.0c NVIDIA ForceWare 162.18 Benchmarks Used: SiSoftware Sandra Futuremark PCMark05 HD Tach 3.0.1 |
We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA File System benchmark module. This test's method of hard disk performance analysis it what we would consider a "light duty" consumer-level evaluation tool. The folks in IT would have your head for recommending a drive based solely on SANDRA File System test results. However, the benchmark is a popular utility within the performance PC enthusiast community, and it does provide a decent quick glance at high-level throughput characteristics of the total storage subsystem, which of course includes HDD controllers and other associated system components.
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The WD7500AAKS jumps right out of the gate to show the competitors who the new sheriff in town is. It ties for the highest Buffered Read score and soundly beats the other drives in the Sequential Read and Random Read tests. This is what we like to see because we tend to place more stock in the Sequential and Random Read tests since standard desktop and gaming application file access places moderate to high loads in these areas. In other words, these are the areas users would notice the performance gain.
And we thought the read scores above were impressive - The WD7500AAKS sets a new bar against other 7200 RPM drives in this test. Not only does the WD7500AAKS easily surpass its older, smaller brother (the WD5000KS), but it also shows the other perpendicular recording drive, the Seagate 7200.10 750GB, that Western Digital is not to be taken lightly.
Most of you are probably familiar with Sandra's Drive Index rating, and this graph basically does a nice job of summarizing what we saw above in the read and write tests. The WD7500AAKS is the leader among all of the drives tested. So far, we are very impressed. Let's see if the trend continues in the other benchmarks.
