TEST BED

TESTING METHODOLOGY 

     Thoroughly testing hard disk drives may require time and patience but that's just about it. Of course that doesn't mean that one must take it lightly, at least not when people base their decision on your results. True many choose to only use 2 or 3 benchmarking suits in order to measure the performance of a drive or drives since quite honestly most benchmarking suites do tend to agree with each other (so it's not really the wrong thing to do) but we always like to take things a step further not because we have to but because we want to be almost 100% certain of the results we get and post in our charts.

     SAS drive testing is more complicated than testing regular SATA drives and so although we use almost the same benchmark suites as with SATA tests in an effort to bring you the most accurate results across the board things are a bit different since we are required to configure/tweak some of those programs to address compatibility issues with the SAS card used. This may not be exactly "fair" for the SAS drive/s in hand since we test them with much heavier read/write loads in some of the suites used but that's the only way to get realistic results without taking into account certain card-specific performance boosts. So once again the benchmarking applications we use are the AIDA64 suite (former Everest Pro), HD Tune Professional (Partial Test/Full Accuracy), HD Tach RW (Full Bench), ATTO (2GB Length), Sisoftware Sandra Pro, Crystal Disk Mark 64bit (2000MB mode) and PCMark 7 (secondary storage suite). These benchmark tools are the best at what they do and as you will also see later on their results more or less agree. Each test is performed a total of 6 times and then the average is recorded into the charts. Temperatures are recorded using Hard Disk Sentinel and after 45 minutes of continuous testing in a 23 degrees Celsius temperature controlled room. Finally we also use an ExTech HD600 dBA meter on each of the drives (5cm away) in order to accurately record their noise levels, although if you don't turn off all system fans when doing so it's quite possible that you will never actually hear the drive working. The operating system as usual is a fresh installation of Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate Service Pack 1 with every update installed up until the 4th of September 2014 while all SAS drive tests are performed using an LSI MegaRAID 9271-8i SAS/SATA III 6Gb/s card updated with the latest firmware and drivers.