Performance in Low-Level Tests
The power consumption tests have revealed certain oddness in the behavior of the Western Digital drive. It consumes considerably less power than its opponents in every operation mode. I’ve explained the Idle mode more or less but the other discrepancies are yet to be elucidated. I’ll try to make everything out using our internal test called IOMark.
I’ll measure the linear read speed first. We used to run the subtest from WinBench 99 for that purpose but this benchmark doesn’t support Hard Disks of such a large capacity. That’s sad because WinBench used to draw very pretty graphs.
So, here are the results produced by IOMark:
Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000
Hitachi Ultrastar A7K1000
The two drives from Hitachi drew almost identical graphs, indicating identical zone maps. We can note that the drives have a relatively low recording density, only 83MBps, at the beginning of the disk.
Samsung Spinpoint F1
The Samsung shows adaptive formatting as well as a record-breaking recording density of 112MBps at the beginning of the disk (it is even 118MBps on the best head/surface pair).
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11
The Barracuda 7200.11 deserves our praises for its high recording density, too. It has four instead of the Samsung’s three platters but these are very dense platters: the data-transfer rate at the beginning of the disk is over 100MBps!
Seagate Barracuda ES.2
Interestingly, the Barracuda ES.2, which is in fact a server-oriented version of the Barracuda.11, has platters with lower density at the beginning of the disk (the capacity of the platter is the same 250GB). Is it a kind of a safety margin for the disk that is supposed to work under harsh conditions?
And finally…
Western Digital Caviar GP
The graph is oddly similar to the data-transfer graphs of the Hitachi HDDs. I even suspected I had made an error while saving the numbers. But on closer inspection the graphs do differ. But how can the four-platter disk from Western Digital have the same data-transfer rate as the five-platter Hitachi? They differ by a quarter in terms of platter capacity!
