| Hitachi 7K400
Benchmarks
The 7K400 was tested with a powerful system in
order to reduce bottlenecks in other subsystems and
thoroughly tax the HDD. Below are the
components used:
|
Motherboard |
Iwill DK8N |
|
CPUs |
AMD Opteron 242, x 2 |
|
Memory |
OCZ Technology PC3200 512MB EL DDR
ECC Registered x 4 pcs = 2GB |
|
Power Supplies |
A+ GPB 550W SSI 24 + 8 pin PSU
(motherboard only) |
| |
Generic 500W (HDDs, Video card,
cooling fans, lighting, and other
devices) |
|
Boot HDD |
Western Digital WD740GD 74GB Raptor |
|
Cooling |
Thermalright XP-120 with Cre | Air
120mm 4.8W fan, x 2 |
|
Video Card |
ATI Radeon X800XT - Platinum Edition |
|
Optical Drive |
Plextor PX-716SA |
|
OS |
Windows XP SP2 |
| |
|
Iwill's wonderful DK8N
has two SATA controllers - the NF3 southbridge and
the SiI3114 SATA RAID controller. Let us test
the 7K400 on the NF3 first.
Below is a
screenshot of the NF3 Device Manager Properties
window. Note how Write Caching and Command
Queuing can be turned on or off. It also has
its own Speed Test utility.
Below are the results of the 7K400 using the NF3
Speed Test utility, using various settings:
|
Command Queuing Setting in NF3 Device
Manager |
OFF |
OFF |
ON |
ON |
|
Write Cache Setting in NF3 Device
Manager |
ON |
OFF |
ON |
OFF |
|
NF3 Speed Test utility Screenshot |
 |
 |
 |
 |
As these images have shown, turning off Command
Queuing brings an approximately 10 MB/s increase in
burst speed. The 7K400 does not natively
support CQ, so maybe that's the reason for the
performance difference.
Next, we used the very useful and popular ATTO
Disk Benchmark on the 7K400 still connected to the
NF3 southbridge. Below were the results:
|
Command Queuing Setting in NF3 Device
Manager |
OFF |
OFF |
|
Write Cache Setting in NF3 Device
Manager |
ON |
OFF |
|
ATTO Disk Benchmark Screenshot |
 |
 |
Turning on Command Queuing in the NF3 Device
Manager Properties page would cause the system to
crash. Looks like the 7K400 really does not
support Command Queuing. As for these results
above, disabling the Write Cache shows a drastic
reduction in the ATTO write tests.
The last set of tests below are HDTach 3.0.1.0
from
www.simplisoftware.com:
|
