Seektime
The next test is the measurement of seek time. In the table are included access times for reading and writing. To obtain a reliable figure we deactivated the cache in writing for this test.
In writing, only the Hitachi went below 13 ms, the 7K250 is 0.2 ms faster than the 180GXP. Western’s hard drives provide results close to the previous generation, still below 14 ms. However even with 60 GB platters with seek times approximately under 1 ms, the Maxtors aren’t able to reach 14 ms. We think that the density increase accompanies the increase of time required by the head placement for Maxtor.
You may notice that writing seek times are more significant. The difference is small for Hitachi and Western and bigger for Maxtor and Seagate.
Once the AAM is activated, seek times noticeably increase. To some extent, only the 7200.7 and Hitachi 7K250 have competitive seek times. It’s a plus compared to the 180GXP whose access time increased to 20ms like the other hard drives.
You may wonder why the SATA version is included in the graph without AAM and the ATA version is with the AAM. The difference in access time between these two hard drives led us to believe this function was activated on the ATA hard drive and not on the S-ATA version. The only problem with the current ATA and SATA firmware is the AAM function is hidden and non-accessible! We were able, however, to verify our hypothesis thanks to an ATA disc equipped with firmware 3.16 with AAM (not available by retail).
