Top Notebook Drive Battle: Seagate versus Western Digital at 750GB

Testing

For these drives, we used our hard drive testing bench system:

• Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD5 Rev2 Motherboard [Provided by Gigabyte]
• Intel Core-i7 i975 Extreme Edition [Provided by Intel]
• 6GB of Kingston HyperX T1 DDR3 RAM @ 1333MHz [Provided by Kingston]
• Coolermaster UCP 1100W PSU [Provided by Coolermaster]
• Kingston 128GB V Series SSD [Provided by Kingston]
• 750GB Western Digital Scorpio Black [Provided by Western Digital]
• 750GB Seagate Momentus [Provided by Seagate]

Performance

AIDA64 (Formerly Everest) – Read Test Suite – 64KB Blocks


When we take a look at the read test suite’s data we can see that there are 5 different types of reads that are tested. The Western Digital Scorpio Black is faster than the Seagate Momentus in every single category except for in Buffered read. Based on our data, it looks like all other drives we tested, regardless of size and speed performed better in the buffered tests than the WD Scorpio Black. By the looks of it, Western Digital appears to sacrifice a little buffered read for overall better performance everywhere else. Furthermore, it appears that for the linear read and random read, the WD Scorpio is about 10MB/s faster than the Seagate Momentus. As we continue to test, we will see if this performance trend continues.

Cinebench CPU


Cinebench itself is actually a CPU test bench program, but what we do is run Cinebench off of the tested HDD. As a result, the program’s performance will vary depending on how quickly it can draw from the 11,000 little files that it needs in order to render and therefore generate a score. When it came to the two drives, the performance difference was there but it was close to negligible. The difference was .03 out of 6.0 which is only half a percent of difference when it pertains to Cinebench. We ran the test multiple times and each time, the difference was 0.03 on the index.

Hyper Pi


HyperPi follows a similar principle that Cinebench does, but it is a more memory intensive application and the speed in this application also does depend on the hard drive a bit. In the case of these two drives, though, there was no difference once we took the averages of all our tests. Of course not all the drives we tested the same, some of our faster and bigger drives did perform better, but they aren’t in this comparison so we won’t include them.

CrystalMark


When it came to CrystalMark we ran the full suite of benchmarks on both drives and noticed that in sequential reads the Western Digital Scorpio Black pulled away even further from the Seagate Momentus than it had in our AIDA64 test. In addition to that, the 134MB/s speed was better than many of our desktop drives that we had tested with the exception of the Barracuda XT 3TB and the Velociraptor; expectedly so.

When we look at the sequential writes, we see the gap significantly narrow to 2MB/s which is barely even worth noting. Once we got to the 512K reads, we got back to the 10MB/s gap. But once we took a look at the writes we noticed a huge gap, a gap of 25MB/s where the WD Scorpio Black was at the top with 80MB/s. Going over to 4K reads, we notice that the performance difference is definitely there again but both of these two drives still performed towards the bottom of our HDD lineup as far as 4K reads went. The story with 4K writes, though, is totally different. The Seagate Momentus simply continued the expected performance trend, while the Western Digital Scorpio Black seemed to buck the trend in a big way. It not only tripled(2.153 MB/s) the 4K writes of the Momentus, but it was the second best hard drive we had tested to date, second only to its faster 600GB Velociraptor brother(3.387MB/s). This was primarily thanks to the Advanced 4K Formatting feature which allows the Scorpio Black to have improved 4K performance compared to previous generations or other drives without it.