Transfer rate
We start with the average debit rate for the entire hard drive.
Logically, the 180GXP is last, because of its 60 GB platters. The performance gap with the fastest hard drive is quite small, 2.5-2.6MB /s. The Hitachi, Maxtor and Western 80 GB platters hard drives have equivalent performances. Only Seagate is slightly behind. You will also notice that the difference between Serial ATA and ATA is logically quite small, because the mechanisms are identical.
Now if we take a closer look at the advancement of the reading head. The X-axis is disc advancement expressed in GB and the Y-axis represents the debit rate measured in KB/s.
All hard drives start with debit rates between 55 and 60 MB/s, then at half way the debit rate falls to 45 to 50 MB/s. Until the 2/3 disc mark the debit rate remains over 40 MB/s. At the end of the disc only the Maxtor and Western have a transfer rate of over 30 MB/s. Looking carefully at the disc shows the 180GXP and 7200.7 are slightly slower. The Maxtor and Western behave almost the same and the 7K250s are faster in the beginning of the disc and slower at the end.
For writing results are identical, with a slight accentuation of the reduced debit rate for IBM at the end of the disc.
