Maxtor's MaXLine III 250GB: Bringing 16MB Buffers and NCQ to Hard Drives
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 25, 2004 12:03 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Multitasking Performance
As we mentioned earlier and as we have seen thus far, NCQ does basically nothing for desktop applications, games and just about anything you'd use your desktop PC for. However, where NCQ can shine is in multitasking environments where the disk access patterns are a little more random. We could have very easily illustrated such a situation using a synthetic benchmark, but staying true to our commitment to focus on real world benchmarks for hard drives, we instead turn back to Business Winstone 2004.Business Winstone 2004 includes a multitasking test as a part of its suite, which does the following:
"This test uses the same applications as the Business Winstone test, but runs some of them in the background. The test has three segments: in the first, files copy in the background while the script runs Microsoft Outlook and Internet Explorer in the foreground. The script waits for both foreground and background tasks to complete before starting the second segment. In that segment, Excel and Word operations run in the foreground while WinZip archives in the background. The script waits for both foreground and background tasks to complete before starting the third segment. In that segment, Norton AntiVirus runs a virus check in the background while Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Project, Microsoft Access, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft FrontPage, and WinZip operations run in the foreground."
Without NCQ enabled, the MaXLine III performs about on par with another very fast 7200RPM drive - Hitachi's new 400GB 7K400 (we've got a review coming soon). The 5% performance difference between the MaXLine III and the Raptor is a bit larger, but still not too great, but enabling NCQ changes all of that.
The impact of NCQ is tremendous in this test, increasing the real world system performance of our test bed by an incredible 10%. That's more than what most processor upgrades will give you. The beauty of this test is that it is definitely real world, and there are a number of times where a similar situation may occur during your normal system use.
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like every multitasking scenario can receive as great of a benefit from NCQ. Here, it helps Maxtor a bit, but not enough to propel the MaXLine III as far as it did in the last test. Here, we see about a 2% difference between the Raptor and the MaXLine III, definitely nothing to write home about...
...and not all multitasking scenarios will actually show a performance increase, thanks to NCQ. Here, we see a slight performance drop - but again nothing noticeable (~2%).
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araczynski - Friday, June 25, 2004 - link
yawn,if ncqprice <= raptorprice then
ncqproduct = possiblesuccess
else
whocares = 1
endif
I would say forget the spinning crap alltogether, why aren't we advnacing the solid state field storage? like that HyperDrive3 thing mentioned on the forums, THAT'S something to drool about.
Da3dalus - Friday, June 25, 2004 - link
I wanna see a Raptor with that 16MB buffer ;)I'm not gonna put a Maxtor drive in my comp again no matter what they come up with, bad previous experiences...
Demon - Friday, June 25, 2004 - link
The Seagate 7200.7 does support NCQ."The Barracuda 7200.7 is the industry's first hard drive family capable of supporting SATA Native Command Queuing (NCQ)"
http://www.seagate.com/cda/newsinfo/newsroom/relea...
apriest - Friday, June 25, 2004 - link
#4, I believe the drive has to support NCQ as well. Doesn't the Raptor support NCQ though?Zar0n - Friday, June 25, 2004 - link
Why did u not benchmark Seagate 7200.7 with NCQ enabled?1GB of ram? Most users have 256mb or 512mb.
What is the technical explanation for some many tests being slower with NCQ?
AnnoyedGrunt - Friday, June 25, 2004 - link
Hmmm, I thought the conclusion in this article gave too much credit to NCQ as far as boosting performance. It helped in one test which has significant multi-tasking, and that is by no means a bad thing, but I do wonder how often that scenario would arise. It seems to me that the human operating the computer would have a hard time keeping that many activities occuring @ the same time. Also, the Hitachi drive (as well as the other 7200 RPM drives) were all usually quite close in performance to the new Maxtor. Finally, in the game loading tests, the Raptor still had a significant lead, which is somewhat dissapointing for me since that is my main concern and I was hoping the Maxtor would do better in that arena.Well, I'll check out the storagereview article to see how that turned out.
-D'oh!
Sivar - Friday, June 25, 2004 - link
Hmm. The results using a Promise TCQ controller were quite different (See StorageReview.com's latest review).Jeff7181 - Friday, June 25, 2004 - link
Well it had to happen sometime... competition for the Raptor.