These tests were completed using the following hardware: Core 2 Duo E6850, Gigabyte GA-X38-DS5 motherboard, ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB, 2x 1GB OCZ DDR2-800 at 5-5-5-15-2T, Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB HDD.

FC-Test

Website: FC-Test

Our FC-Test benchmark is split into three parts. First is a write test involving the creation of a file pattern similar to common files such as MP3s or large video files. Once created on the drive, we then copy the file pattern from the drive back to a different folder on the same drive producing a combined read/write test. Finally we test the read speed of the drive by performing FC-Test's read test of the files copied.

For our benchmarks, we're using both the MP3 pattern, consisting of two hundred and seventy small files totalling 0.99GB, and the the ISO pattern, consisting of three large files totalling 1.6GB in size. We feel these file patterns represent the most common files people will be frequently copying to and from an drive, and can be interpreted as as close to a real world file transfer test as possible.

MP3

Using our MP3 test pattern, the Service Pack 2 beta ends up being faster in both write and copy tasks by three and 1.3 percent respectively, but it was slower in the read pattern by three and a half percent.

ISO

The ISO pattern test showed performance increases across the board with the improvements ranging from 4.7 percent in the copy test to 0.7 percent in the read test. The performance improvement in the write test equated to approximately two percent.