It doesn’t matter how good any of the synthetic suites are, the real meat of the testing has to be under absolute real world conditions. This proves difficult as to record results we have to narrow down fluctuation. Therefore while we would say these are the most useful results to get from this review, there is always going to be a slight margin for error – its not absolutely scientific.
Firstly we installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit Edition onto each of the drives and performed a clean update from Microsoft with all patches and security fixes. We then install a basic suite of software, such as Office, Firefox and Adobe Design, then we install AVG free antivirus. We used a digital watch for this startup and repeated the test five times for each drive – once we had these five results we averaged the results and took that for the final figure.
Boot time with a single drive is around 69 seconds, or 7 seconds slower than the 3.5 inch 1TB drive. When two Scorpios are configured inside the Icy Dock as Raid 0, the time is reduced to 43 seconds. A substantial decrease in waiting time.
Adding a second drive reduces the STALKER Call Of Pripyat load time by 9 seconds. Easily noticeable.
very ‘apple’ like in appearance aint it?
Nice idea. ive a few 2.5 inch drives in a drawer here, but they aren’t worth putting in this, one is an old 120gb 5,400 rpm thing and the other is even worse 🙂
Thats really clever. like the onboard raid controller. useful indeed