Seagate and Western Digital 1TB Drives: Improved and Green

PCMark Vantage Continued...

Remaining true to what we've come to expect in our previous tests, PCMark Vantage shows us that neither the WD Caviar GP nor the Seagate 7200.11 are performance leaders. While the results they turn in are respectable, they are no threat to the drives sitting atop our charts.

Of interest, the Seagate performed poorly in both benchmarks that had higher write operation content. We have re-run the tests several times, and continue to see the Seagate 7200.11 drive turn in sub-par results in these types of tests. We saw this trend continue not only in PCMark Vantage, but also throughout the entire test suite for this article. The results indicate that the write performance problems with the 7200.10 are still present with this series update.

Vista Startup / Shutdown

As in our Windows XP test, we feel it is important to include Windows Vista startup and shutdown figures. Given the amount of suspend-related problems that Microsoft is still working out with Vista, we will exclude hibernation and resume scores from our current test methodology. We will re-evaluate this after Service Pack 1 is available for general use.

Our startup timer begins when we select Vista from the OS Choices menu at startup. We end when the login screen appears. For the shutdown test, we turn off Vista with no applications running. We run the test three times, and take the average result of the three scores.

The Western Digital GP is clearly slower than any other drive in the startup tests while it performs better in the shutdown test. The Seagate 7200.11 has results again at the bottom of this elite pack of drives, but with better performance than the WD drive in the startup test and lower performance in the shutdown test.