HD Tach 3.0

We start off with HD Tach 3.0 (which needs to be run in Windows XP SP2 compatibility mode under Vista to work).

The access times are directly related to the platter spin speed as well as the cache size:



The Seagate drive boasts the lowest access time, while the 5400rpm Scorpio is the slowest, overall though the difference is quite small between these drives. Do note that desktop counterparts usually score sub 14ms while the Western Digital 10.000rpm scores even sub 10ms.

Sustained read speeds are up next:



Here we see that a ~35% increase in raw read speed (Seagate -> WD Scorpio Black) doesn’t necessarily translate into the same speed boost overall. The 5400rpm Scorpio does quite well here, beating the Seagate despite its lower RPM.

ATTO HDD Benchmark

The ATTO HDD benchmark differentiates itself from HDTach by its separation of results by file chunk size; the smaller the files (and file chunks) the lower the performance of a drive.



The Seagate drive tops out at ~50mb/s in the read speed test, the Scorpio 5400rpm does better , up to 63mb/s, the Scorpio Black with its 16Mb cache shows an earlier boost, all the way up to ~71Mb/s.



The write speed test came out surprisingly similar to the read speed, but there are dips in speed here and there depending on the file chunk size used.