4.2k 60gb, 5.4k 100gb, 7.2k 60gb, Hard Drive Shootout results!

The results are in! Suprising results!

I have a 60gb 4.2k rpm hitachi drive from my HP, and now have a 60gb 7.2k Hitachi drive from my 9300 and a 100gb 5.4k rpm Seagate drive that I just installed today so I figured... why not stick them all in the 9300 and see how big the difference really is...

One word accurately measured in HDTach... WHOA!

Results:
8MB Quick test
4.2k 60gb Hitachi v. 7.2k 60gb Hitachi v. 5.4k rpm
Random Access: 21.9ms v. 15.2ms v. 16.9ms
Average Read: 23.1MB/s v. 31.9MB/s v. 30.9MB/s (3% difference!)
Max Read (approx) 31MB/s v. 40.5MB/s v. 40.25MB/s
Min Read (approx) 14.5MB/s v. 20.5MB/s v. 20MB/s

32MB Test
4.2k 60gb Hitachi v. 7.2k 60gb Hitachi
Random Access: 20.1ms v. 14.5ms v. 16.8ms
Average Read: 22.8MB/s v. 31.6MB/s v. 31.1MB/s (<-- look at this number!)
Max Read (approx) 31MB/s v. 40.5MB/s v. 40MB/s
Min Read (approx) 15MB/s v. 20MB/s v. 19.5MB/s

Now the question you are going to ask:
#1 How was this test done: Reformatted XP-Pro on the 9300 (specs below) and HDTach loaded then run. (yes I did have to ghost my 60gb 4200rpm and have to re-install it on my Desktop, and YES 45gb of data does take a LONG time to backup and reinstall on this drive).

Now the SUPER interesting note:
What people forget is that HD Tach tests sequential read speeds throughout the disk. While this may not seem too important it certainly is! The reason for this is that the outer edges of the disk are read faster due to their higher velocity. Why this matters is because if I took the seagate's first 60gb to match the capacity of the Hitachi 60gb drives the MIN transfer speed would have been 30MB/s! What this tells us is for the first 60g of capacity, the 5400rpm 100gb drive is actually MUCH faster (10% or MORE) than the 60gb 7200rpm Hitachi! In fact the 5400rpm drive stays around 30MB/s until 67-70gb then falls down to around 25MB/s between that breakpoint and 90gb. The last 10gb of capacity gets down to 20MB/s and is certainly hurting the numbers a lot. Everything is not great for the 5400rpm Seagate though, it can't touch the seek times though so the extra RPM's of the 7200rpm drive are still important, but something to chew on.

Overall, very interesting results...

P.S. What's that you say... we need a battery life comparison... how did you know what I was going to be up to next week?

Yes it is! I was not expecting the performance I got out of this little drive! After finals I'm dying to check out battery life differences.

I hope people find this useful as I see it is a question asked here all the time. Since I had a pretty good selection of drives to test on the same machine with the same exact software configuration I figured it would probably give the best answer we have to date.

That is a pretty bad article IMO from Tom. All he needed is sequential read speeds, random access times, and load times.

The fact that he used the dumb click and report scores benchmarks, and never found that for the first 60gb the seagate ran faster than the Hitachi 60gb shows how much effort he put into it.

He does some good stuff and back in 1999/2000 when I decided to sell my site, I was either going to join him and Alex ("Sharky" from SharkyExtreme.com). I had a contract from the guy managing their business at the time, but wanted to go to college.

I think the REAL kicker would be to partition the 100gb drive into 70gb and 30gb partitions. If you could use the 30gb partition for junk like MP3's that don't require that much bandwidth anything on the 70gb partition would just tear!