3TB Hard Drive Round-up: Hitachi, Seagate, WD

Testing continues with SiSoftware's SANDRA XII, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. Here, we used the Physical Disk test suite and provided the results from our comparison drives. The benchmarks were run without formatting and read/write performance metrics are detailed below.

SiSoft SANDRA 2010  Synthetic Benchmark

With SANDRA's physical disk benchmark, we find the 3TB Hitachi Deskstar offers the highest write performance at 128.77 MB/s. Seagate's drive edges out the Deskstar with read speed at 123.3 MB/s. Both Western Digital drives offer almost identical performance, but the AV-GP does show a tiny lead over the Caviar Green.