Lab test: 8 ATA / S-ATA 7200 RPM hard drives (page 2: The test, hard drives)

The test

To reduce the number of hard drives tested we made two choices. The first was based on a hard drive capacity of 120 GB. This is currently the most sold on the single component market thanks to an excellent price/capacity ratio. Also 60 GB platters used to have significant differences depending on the platter (inferior access time on an 80 GB platter, for example). With standard capacity, 80, 120 or even 160 GB, differences are only in the number of faces and platters.

Our second choice was on the cache level, which is 8 MB for all hard drives. Performance gains brought by this cache are more than significant in the application area and its interest is limited for pure transfers. Price differences for the moment are minimal.

For our tests we used the H2Bench utility, which has theoretical (access time, cache reading/writing rate) and practical tests based on reading/writing reproductions in various uses (disc swap, software installation, file copy and the following applications Word, Photoshop and F-Prot). This test is made on the first 40 GB of the hard drive.

Tests were made on an ASUSTeK P4C800-E Deluxe motherboard. Hard drives were connected either to the ATA Parallel port or to the Serial ATA. There is inborn management of these two interfaces by the Intel ICH5 Southbridge. To activate Audio Acoustic Management, we used the Hitachi feature tool utility.

Hard drives

For theses tests we brought together 8 hard drives purchased from a retail outlet:

- Hitachi Ofskstar 7K250 120 GB, ATA, 8 MB of cache (HDS722512VLAT80)
- Hitachi Ofskstar 7K250 120 GB, SATA, 8 MB of cache (HDS722512VLSA80)
- Maxtor DiaMBnd Max Plus 9 120 GB, ATA, 8 MB of cache (6Y120P0)
- Maxtor DiaMBnd Max Plus 9 120 GB, SATA, 8 MB of cache (6Y120M0)
- Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 Plus 120 GB, ATA, 8 MB of cache (ST3120026A)
- Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 120 GB, SATA, 8 MB of cache (ST3120026AS)
- Western Digital WD1200JB 120 GB, ATA, 8 MB of cache
- Western Digital WD1200JD 120 GB, SATA, 8 MB of cache

To compare performance we added an IBM/Hitachi 180GXP:

- IBM/Hitachi 120 GB, ATA, 8 MB of cache (IC35L120AVV207-1)

For your interest we also talk about the Raptor Serial ATA 10 000 Rpm by Western on the second to last page.