SYSmark2004 is a program that simulates the use of real-world applications. Thus, we consider this the best software to measure, in practical terms, the system performance.

The benchmarks are divided into two groups:

• Internet Content Creation: Simulates the authoring of a website containing text, images, videos and animations. The following programs are used: Adobe After Effects 5.5, Adobe Photoshop 7.01, Adobe Premiere 6.5, Discreet 3ds Max 5.1, Macromedia Dreamweaver MX, Macromedia Flash MX, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9, McAfee VirusScan 7.0 and Winzip 8.1.
• Office Productivity: Simulates the use of an office suite, i.e. simulates sending e-mails, word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, etc. The following programs are used: Adobe Acrobat 5.05, Microsoft Office XP SP2, Internet Explorer 6.0 SP1, NaturallySpeaking 6, McAfee VirusScan 7.0 and Winzip 8.1.

This software delivers several results, all of them using a specific SYSmark2004 unit. First we have a SYSmark2004 overall score. Then we have a group result for each batch listed above. And for each batch, we have specific results: 3D Creation, 2D Creation and Web Publication for Internet Content Creation; and Communication, Document Creation and Data Analysis for Office Productivity.

For a better visualization, we separated the results into three graphs: overall score, Internet Content Creation score and Office Productivity score.

On SYSmark2004 overall score we could see performance difference between our single hard disk drive and our RAID0 array only on half of the our scenarios, when we used 4 KB, 8 KB and 128 KB stripes (5.29%, 3.90% and 4.46%, respectively).

On SYSmark2004 Internet Content Creation batch overall score we could see performance difference only when using 128 KB stripes (3.22%) and 4 KB stripes (4.08%). We saw no performance difference on 3D Creation batch and the major performance difference was on 2D Creation batch, where the use of RAID0 increased the performance between 5.39% and 8.52%. On Web Publication batch we could only see a performance increase when using 128 KB stripes (3.37%) and 4 KB stripes (3.61%).

On SYSmark2004 Office Productivity batch overall score we could see performance difference when we used 128 KB stripes (5.80%), 8 KB stripes (5.07%) and 4 KB stripes (6.52%). On Communication batch we saw an expressive performance gain when using 4 KB stripes (15.25%), 8 KB stripes (11.30%), 16 KB stripes (5.08%) and 128 KB stripes (13.56%). We saw no performance difference on Document Creation and Data Analysis batches.