Unsung Heroes: 14 Years of Hard Drive Performance

by Dave Altavilla — Thursday, November 11, 2010, 02:03 PM EDT

When the likes of WD or Seagate launch a new hard drive, the product is hailed as a more efficient means of storing data. Useful? Very. High class or sexy? Not so much. You've got to admit that hard drives have gotten a bum rap. Granted, they're still the slowest part of the system, but HDD manufacturers deserve a bit more credit than they typically get.

We decided to take a look at how standard, spinning hard drive performance has evolved over the past 14 years. We rounded up a representative group of hard drives, formatted them, scanned them for bad sectors, and ran a few modern benchmarks to see how much performance has improved.

Unsung Heroes: 14 Years of Hard Drive Performance

Tags: Seagate, Western Digital, Hard Drive, HDD, Storage, WD, VelociRaptor

David Altavilla

Dave Altavilla is the founder, Editor In Chief and Publisher of HotHardware.com. With decades of experience as a semiconductor sales engineer, Dave Altavilla founded HotHardware.com over 25 years ago. Dave is also a published contributor to various technology-based publications and is a featured Tech Analyst expert on various network media shows.