Thread: HD Tach RW

HD Tach RW is the first low-level test, where the hard drives are tested without creating any file system-making the results quite accurate. Although burst speeds are not of practical significance, they give us a glimpse of the drive functioning as a whole. We found that Seagate's 1200.10 750 GB achieves the maximum through put, followed by its newer counterpart-the Barracuda 1200.11 1 TB. Both these drives reach an astonishing 260 Mbps-quite close to the theoretical limit.



The WD Raptor has a random access time of 6 ms, matched only by the Hitachi 1 TB drive. Other drives fall far behind here, with double- digit random access times. We also see this performance in the file copy tests. The Green Power drives from WD posted the worst access time, thanks mostly to the slower rotation speed.
The WD Caviar SE16 320 GB, Seagate 7200.11 drives and the single platter Seagate 250 GB sported the best Average Read I Write speeds.

The large 16 and 32 MB caches are doing their bit to speed up the read and write operations of these drives. Other drives were not far behind, but a difference of 10 Mbps between hard drives translates to a lot more in practical usage. Seagate's Barracuda 7200.10 250 GB marches ahead of other drives in this test, thanks to a perfect balance of cache, inter¬face speed and single platter configuration.