PCMark 2005
All the test descriptions are taken from PCMark 2005’s whitepaper.

For these tests, RankDisk, an application developed by Intel is used. RankDisk is used to record a trace of disk activity during usage of typical applications. These traces can then be replayed to measure the performance of disk operations for that usage. RankDisk records disk access events using the device drivers and bypasses the file system and the operating system’s cache. This makes the measurement independent of the file system overhead or the current state of the operating system. The traces contain different amount of writing and reading on the disk; total ratio in the HDD test suite disk operations is 53% reads and 47% of writes.

The following traces are used:

Windows XP Startup: This is the Windows XP start trace, which contains disk activities occurring at
system start-up. The test is 90% read and 10% write. This trace contains no user activity.

Hitachi 7K1000 1TB : 11.674 MB/s
Western Digital Raptor 150 GB WD1500ADFD : 11.745 MB/s

Application Loading: This is a trace containing disk activities from loading various applications. It includes opening and closing of the following applications:
Microsoft Word
Adobe Acrobat Reader 5
Windows Media Player
3DMark 2001SE
Leadtek Winfast DVD
Mozilla Internet Browser
The application loading trace is 83% reads and 17% writes.

Hitachi 7K1000 1TB : 10.126 MB/s
Western Digital Raptor 150 GB WD1500ADFD : 10.678 MB/s

General Hard Disk Drive Usage: This trace contains disk activities from using several common applications. These are: Opening a Microsoft Word document, performing grammar check, saving and closing, Compression and decompression using Winzip, Encrypting and decrypting a file using PowerCrypt, Scanning files for viruses using F-Secure Antivirus, Playing an MP3 file with Winamp, Playing a WAV file with Winamp, Playing a DivX video using DivX codec and Windows Media Player
Playing a WMV video file using Windows Media Player, Viewing pictures using Windows Picture Viewer
- Browsing the internet using Microsoft Internet Explorer, Loading, playing and exiting a game using Ubisoft Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon. The General Usage trace is 60% read and 40% write.

Hitachi 7K1000 1TB : 9.061 MB/s
Western Digital Raptor 150 GB WD1500ADFD : 10.122 MB/s

Virus Scanning: Virus scanning is a critical task in today’s PC usage. As the major bottleneck of scanning viruses is in hard disk activity, it is reasonable to include virus scanning as a HDD test. The test consists of HDD activity of scanning 600MB of files for viruses. The Virus Scanning test is mostly disk reading (99.5%).

Hitachi 7K1000 1TB : 103.217 MB/s
Western Digital Raptor 150 GB WD1500ADFD : 93.581 MB/s

File Write: This trace contains disk activities from writing. Disk idle times have been compressed to 50 milliseconds that was the smallest idle time interval that tests are reported in Megabytes processed per second.

Hitachi 7K1000 1TB : 80.481 MB/s
Western Digital Raptor 150 GB WD1500ADFD : 86.427 MB/s