PCMark Vantage Hard Disk Performance

PCMark Vantage is the latest revision of the popular benchmark family, and it follows along with PCMark05 by offering a specific HDD benchmark suite. These represent real-world usage patterns, often featuring standard applications and functions. There any many different tests, and we have selected four of these for our review: Gaming, Import Images, Vista Startup, and Video Editing.

The PCMark Vantage Gaming HDD test measures the hard drive performance when streaming data using the Alan Wake game from Remedy. This is 99.95% a disk read benchmark. Here, the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB hard drive proves to be the fastest performer, something that rates for high for a hardcore gaming-oriented site, just sliding ahead of the Western Digital 750GB drive.

The Import Images disk benchmark measures the hard drive performance while importing a large collection of images to Windows Photo Gallery. While primarily a disk read test, this does include over 15% write operations. It's another very close race in this benchmark, but the Barracuda 7200.11 1TB drive finally pulls out a very slim victory.

The Windows Vista Startup HDD benchmark measures the drive performance while loading Windows Vista Ultimate. This is similar to the previous test, with an 85/15 disk read/write breakdown. The Windows Vista Startup results are different from the older Windows XP ones, and now find the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB as the top performance option.

Our final PCMark Vantage HDD test is the Video Editing benchmark. This measures concurrent hard drive performance while using Windows Movie Maker for a variety of video editing tasks. This is a very good PCMark Vantage disk test, and features almost an even split between read/write operations. The Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB cannot make it a clean sweep in the Vantage testing, and falls down to second place in this test.