Performance in PCMark’04

We formatted the HDDs in NTFS for the PCMark tests. To minimize the effect of the OS on the results, we repeated the test ten times and wrote down the maximum number.

We are becoming more suspicious about the correctness of this test, so we won’t discuss each of its components individually. Let’s see the overall picture instead.

Having the best results in the two subtests with the highest weights, the WD2500KS wins with a considerable lead. Two ATA drives from Hitachi share second place as they have the best results in the Windows boot-up test. The Samsung HDDs haven’t done anything exceptional in PCMark’04, yet take places in the top ten between the Serial ATA models of the second-generation Maxtor DiamondMax 10 series and the Western Digital drives. The Maxtor DiamondMax 10 Plus 9 and all of the Seagate Barracuda did not fight for top places, although the models with a 16MB buffer had an excellent result when copying files. Well, we’ll examine copying and other file-processing operations in more detail in the next section.