Western Digital Raptor 150: a test

Tests 2/2
We then opened simultaneously the information panel of 4 large folders (Command-I):
- System
- Applications
- Library
- Users
Once again, the timer was started when pressing Command-I then stopped when the last information panel was completed.

Both tests are more dependent on access time than on high data transfer speed, so the winner is the drive able to access data quickly.
And in both cases the faster drive is the Raptor, which is in average 50% faster than the Maxtor.
We then went on and performed an even more practical test:
If you are using Entourage as your e-mail application, you know that this application never used the cache memory, and as a consequence is really dependent on HD access time. The Entourage system might be interesting on a safety point of view if you have a power failure or anything wrong happens, you do not lose data; but the drawback is of course that it might be quite time-consuming for some actions. In our test, we requested in Entourage the deletion of 1436 messages, as for each deleted message, the application is updating its database.

Here again the Raptor performs the task 30% faster, you save 5.3 seconds.
To conclude, we decided to do the opposite, and evaluate the performance when duplicating a large folder, in this case our Application folder, worth 8.93GB of data splitted over 22901 files. Here, the drive will read each file, then write it somewhere else. In summary, it is a synthetic reading/writing test.

This is probably the most impressive result, the Raptor is completing the task twice faster than the Maxtor, saving 10 minutes of our time.