Hardware

HD Speed Performance

HD Speed is a benchmark that measures both sustained and burst data transfer rates of various storage devices, including hard disks. It presents the overall hard disk transfer rates in a graphic format, as well as a numerical average. The test block size is also user-definable up to a maximum of 16MB, and the benchmark run time is configurable. For this test, we have run HD Speed using the default block size for both Burst Mode and Average Read benchmarks. Each test is performed for 3 minutes, with the average Burst Mode and Read Data Transfer rate presented in graph format.

The HD Speed Burst Mode benchmarking again shows the Seagate Barracuda drives with a noticeable performance advantage compared to the Western Digital 750GB. At least this time, the WD drive makes a far better showing, and easily demonstrates it is in SATA 3.0 Gb/s mode, staying well ahead of our SATA 1.5 Gb/s models.

The Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB drive has another very nice showing in the Average Read test, and notice how the two newer models have significantly higher performance in this benchmark.

SiSoft SANDRA XII 2008 Performance

SiSoft SANDRA XII 2008 includes a File System benchmark that combines the read/write (buffered, random, sequential) and seek time tests into once easy-to-digest number. This is a composite figure representing the overall drive performance based on the average of the read and write tests. We are also including the Access Time results, which measure the random access times (in ms) of the benchmarked hard drives.

Due to differing test scenarios, the SiSoft SANDRA XII 2008 File System benchmark might not yield the exact same numbers, but the overall rankings stay very consistent. Once again, the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB finishes with the top score, followed by the Western Digital 750GB hard drive. Both are also nicely ahead of the other older performance hard drives, showing that even at the same capacity, newer models are usually faster.

The Access Time scores show a natural progression from the more entry-level drives, to the top-of-the-line models. The Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB drive places at the top of the chart with a 13ms rating, but it is tied with two other models.