Lab test: 8 ATA / S-ATA 7200 RPM hard drives (page 1: Introduction)

Since our last hard drive comparative test one year ago, the situation has changed with the release of new products. It’s time to take stock of the current situation!

80 GB and Serial ATA

The similarity of all new hard drives in this generation is the 80GB platter density (40 GB per face) instead of the previous 60 GB for most platters. This evolution brings two main advantages. From the technical point of view increasing density increases the disc debit rate. From an economical point of view it reduces fabrication costs. For an 80 GB hard drive, two platters and three reading heads are required. For a 120 GB hard drive, we used to have two platters and four reading heads. Now only two platters and three reading heads are required.

The other change is the widespread use of Serial ATA interface. In terms of performance, gains are currently limited on the cache level with a faster interface (150 MB/s with inborn SATA management or a maximum of 133 MB/s with an additional PCI chip). On the practical side, the reduction of connector size due to the serial bus is as interesting from a design perspective as for a greater air circulation in computers.

This Serial ATA hard drive is equipped either with LSI or Marvel chips that convert all Serial ATA instructions coming from/going to the computer and the hard drive controller’s Parallel ATA instructions. The inborn Serial ATA controller integration will make it possible to remove the intermediate step that increases controller card fabrication costs.

Product returns: stand by

The current situation is similar for all manufactures according to information provided by one of our on-line retail partners (LDLC). IBM’s difficult time seems to be behind them, and we hope to never have to go through another double figure rate of return.

We have noticed, however, that two hard drives have higher than average return rates (2-4% is average). 8.8% of the Maxtor 7200 Rpm 200 GB were returned in 2003, and 7.03% of IBM’s 180GXP 60 GB. Seagate is still the most reliable brand with a 1.3% instead of 2.2% for Maxtor, 2.4% for Western Digital, and 3.3% for Hitachi/IBM.

The warranty is currently one year for all 2 MB hard drives. For all 8 MB cache hard drives with a rotation speed of 7200 Rpm, IBM and Western provide an extended warranty of three years. Maxtor and Seagate also have the same type of warranty extension but only for 120 GB and above hard drives.