Performance Analysis
Capacity? Value for money? Who's got what? Read on to find out who has the best marriage of both.
Hard disk drives are purchased primarily for their storage room. Capacity is king, followed fairly closely behind by speed and features. While we know what the limitations are, users always need to take the manufacturer's performance claims with a grain of salt.
We put out the call to all major hard disk manufacturers to send in their largest capacity drives with nothing under 160GB. Hitachi came back to us with a drive so large it dwarfed even the massive 250GB entrants from Maxtor and Western Digital.
All of our featured drives are 7200rpm 8MB cache drives with SATA interfaces, the only exception being the WD Caviar SE WD2000 PATA which operates on EIDE which is more commonly found on motherboards manufactured before about 2002.
We've tested to see which of the featured drives comes out on top, by taking into consideration capacity, price and performance. We're also interested in the developments of the SATA interface and whether the truth on large disk-buffer yield performance gains is founded.
Our tests were run on an AMD Athlon 64 3400+ 2.2GHz processor with half a gigabyte of RAM, ATI RADEON 9800XT and Windows XP Pro SP1. Each drive was tested as a primary-master to simulate real-world performance as would be typical in most user's setup.
We ran Drivespeed32's full read test including the random access test feature to benchmark the drives. Drivespeed32 measures the read-speed of the whole disk; and offers a visual representation of read-speed vs cylinder.
You'll notice the SATA Drivespeed32 graphs are tighter than its IDE counterpart due to the data being sent down a single stream and error checked. Alternatively the IDE graphs are a little wider spread - as they lack error correction and failed data is resent down the bus. A disk's platter is zoned into concentric circles, and transfer rates are always faster in the outer zones of a platter - this is the reason for the downward curves on the graph.