3TB Hard Drive Round-up: Hitachi, Seagate, WD
Test System and ATTO
Our Test Methodologies: Under each test condition, the drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a different hard disk used for the OS and benchmark installations. The drives were left blank without partitions wherever possible, unless a test required them to be partitioned and formatted, as was the case with our ATTO and PCMark 7 benchmark tests. Windows firewall, automatic updates and screen savers were all disabled before testing. In all test runs, we rebooted the system and waited several minutes for drive activity to settle before invoking a test.
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Motherboard - Video Card - Memory - Hard Drives -
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Hardware Used: Intel Core i5 2500K Asus P8P67 WS Revolution Asus DirectCU II GTX 580 4GB Kingston DDR3-1866 Hitachi Deskstar 3TB Seagate Barracuda XT 3TB Western Digital AV-GP 3TB Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB Crucial M225 128GB (OS drive) |
OS Chipset Drivers - Video Drivers - |
Relevant Software: Windows 7 64-bit Intel 9.2.0.1015 NVIDIA ForceWare v275.33 Benchmarks Used: ATTO CrystalDiskMark HDTach HDTune PCMark 7 SiSoft SANDRA |
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ATTO is a disk benchmark that measures transfers across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and graphs them out in an easily interpreted chart. We chose .5kb through 8192kb transfer sizes over a total max volume length of 256MB. This test was performed on blank, formatted drives with NTFS partitions.
Looking at read performance, there isn't a clear winner among the group. But it's easy to see that both the Hitachi and Seagate drives hold distinct advantages over the slower spinning Western Digital drives. That observation changed somewhat, when we looked at write performance, where the Barracuda XT scores a decisive win against the competition and the Hitachi Deskstar falls much more in line with the WD drives.
