ADOBE CS6 LOAD TIME
Photoshop is a notoriously slow loading program under the best of circumstances, and while the latest version is actually pretty decent, when you add in a bunch of extra brushes and the such you get a really great torture test which can bring even the best of the best to their knees. Let’s see how our review unit faired in the Adobe crucible!
Once again this drive makes even 10,000rpm hard drives seem slow in comparison. Better still the new v5 does not need to be in RAID for its performance advantages to shine through. Color us impressed.
VMWare Load Time Performance
VMWare is a powerful application which allows users the ability to run a virtualized Operating System from inside their main OS. This program is not only processor and RAM intensive but puts significant load on the storage subsystem with deep, heavy read/write IO requests to the drive. To help give you a general idea on the performance improvements from running a RAM Drive we have timed the time it takes to load XP SP3 from inside VMWare.
Unlike the v4 series which had most of its performance advantages negated by the VelociRaptor’s brute force approach of simply spinning the platters faster, this new Enterprise Capacity 3.5 v5 model is so inconceivably fast in and out of RAID that its ‘slow’ 7,200rpm platter speed just doesn’t matter. Yes, the latency is higher than the VelociRaptor’s, but even with this built in advantage the VelociRaptor quickly succumbs to this juggernaut’s technology advances. Basically the EC v5’s onboard cache is nearly precognizant in its abilities and when this massive 256MB cache is combined with ultra-dense 1.25TB platters the results… well the results speak for themselves.
Borderlands 2 Load time
For Borderlands 2 we have recorded the time it takes to fast travel from Sanctuary map to Oasis. Oasis is the beginning of the Captain Scarlett and Her Pirate’s Booty DLC. This was chosen as it not only is a special level not included in the original Borderlands 2 game and thus contains additional data which should slow the load of this special map.
We knew this new series was going to be good, but there is a difference between knowing something and knowing it. Logically we knew this was going to be even better than its predecessor the ‘v4’ series, but we were not expecting to see multiple seconds shaved off the load time in single and RAID configurations. That is downright astonishing an accomplishment for a single generation.
CoD: Ghosts Load time
For the Call of Duty: Ghosts we timed the level load time for the map called Into the Deep in the single player game. This level was chosen as it contains a large map and loads a lot of data from the storage device to the GPU.
Once again these drives post numbers that are rather incredible. Not only does this new series scale very nicely in RAID, they don’t have to be in RAID to in order to get excellent performance numbers. Put another way this new v5 makes even the 10,000rpm VelociRaptor seem ‘slow’. Brilliant stuff.
Saints Row 3 Load time
For Saints Row 3 (labelled ‘SR3’ in the chart) we have recorded the load time from a specific save game. The game was saved just at the end of the ‘Shaundi saved’ version of “Three Way Ending” but before the cut scene. This was chosen as the game not only loads the Three Way Ending data but also the next level “Gangsta’s in Space” DLC level.
It comes as no surprise to see that Seagate’s new Enterprise Capacity model has been optimized for RAID scenarios. While it is indeed extremely fast when only in JBOD / single drive scenarios, it is when RAID’ed that this drive goes from being incredibly fast to simply amazing. Some of this boost is due to having nearly half a Gigabyte of cache to further boost performance, but these results really do come down to the EC v5’s highly tweaked firmware and denser platters. In either case, the new v5 Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD series is one power house of a performer – in and out of raid.
