Hard Drive Performance

HD Tach RW; Version 3.0.4.0

HD Tach will test the sequential read, random access and interface burst speeds of your attached storage device (hard drive, flash drive, removable drive, etc). All drive technologies such as SCSI, IDE/ATA, 1394, USB, SATA and RAID are supported. Test results from HD Tach can be used to confirm manufacturer specs, analyze your system for proper performance, and compare your performance with others. HD Tach is very easy to use, quick, and presents data in easy-to-read graphs, including the ability to compare two storage devices on screen at the same time for easy analysis.

Benchmark Results: Using a Western Digital WD1500ADFD Raptor hard drive as a secondary drive we tested hard disk performance on the AMD 780G and NVIDIA 780a platforms. All of the motherboards had the same random access score and roughly the same average read speeds. The ASUS M3N-HT did have the highest burst speed though with 132.6MB/Sec.

Just for fun we also tested the new 300GB Western Digital VelociRaptor on the 780a SLI powered motherboard to see how the chipset handles newer 3.0Gbps hard drives.  It seemed to do fine, but had a slightly lower burst speed than other systems we have tried the WD VelociRaptor on.