The True Tests Begin

It was time to begin the punishment. Three different configurations. Five tests in all to be performed on each of these configurations. I began with HD Tach's Quick Bench

HD Tach

For these tests, I used HD Tach version 3.0.1.0 running the quick bench. The HD Tach benchmarking tool was used because it can provide several key values such as CPU usage, access time, average read, and the burst speed. Things you want to look for are lower values in CPU usage and access time, and higher values for the burst speed and and average read speed. You will see the three configurations of the Barracudas and an average 80GB SATA HD for comparison purposes.

It's clear to see that the Barracudas are faster, more sophisticated hard drives. They also form a Healthy RAID that can perform very well. The Non-RAID HD shows some great numbers as well, which are only more exemplified in the RAID-0 and RAID-5 setups. These hard drives could be capable of preparing a 5 course meal, but they won't capture a gamer's interest without putting up some nice performance numbers. Granted this is a static benchmark of which we have one more, but it is a good quantitative measurement of areas you otherwise wouldn't be able to see numbers for.

SiSoft Sandra 2007 File System Benchmark

SiSoft's Sandra allows us to measure some aspects that HD Tach leaves out, including buffered write and read speeds. Unfortunately, I just noticed this graph's drives are in a different order than the rest so pay closer attention. The access time is near double that of the ordinary SATA drive, but remains steady through the RAID configurations. However, not only do the Barracudas outperform the ordinary SATA drive, they show true power in the RAID-0 configuration as well. RAID-0 dominates in both read and write speeds, with RAID-5 not too far behind.