HOW WE TESTED
Hard Drives
The test PC consisted of an MSI 815E Pro motherboard, Pentium III 866, 128MB of SDRAM and a 64MB Hercules 3D Prophet II Ultra graphics card.
All drives were tested under Windows 2000 Professional. A fresh and identical disk image was loaded onto each hard drive. We then ran WinBench 99 V1.2 Business and High-End disk tests. We also ran the WinBench Disk Inspection tests on all of the drives. The list of programs emulated in the Business Disk tests is as follows:
- Corel WordPerfect Suite 8
- Quattro Pro 8
- WordPerfect 8
- Lotus SmartSuite
- 1-2-3 97
- Word Pro 97
- Microsoft Office 97:
- Access 97
- Excel 97
- PowerPoint 97
- Word 97
- Netscape Navigator® 4.04
For the High-End disk tests a different set of applications is used to emulate disk behaviour. The set consists of the following:
- Adobe Photoshop 4.01
- Adobe Premiere 4.2
- AVS/Express 3.4
- Bentley System's MicroStation SE
- Microsoft FrontPage 98
- Microsoft Visual C++ 5.0
- Sonic Foundry Sound Forge 4.0
Disk Inspection Tests
The Disk Inspection Tests measures the hard disks Access Times, CPU Utilization and Transfer Rates.
16%
7%
