500GB Hard Drive Round-Up

Reviews: Storage

Author:
Editor:
Sponsor:
Published:

Richard Poelling
Kurtis
N/A
Sep. 26, 2006

Specifications

<< Previous

Next >>

Initial Comparison

All three of these drives use the newer SATA II connection technology. All of these are 500GB drives running at a rotational speed of 7200 RPM. Looking through their spec sheets you will also obviously find a plethora of fancy sounding names and cool sounding features. That is all well and good, and I imagine each company's marketing department is very proud of itself. The question still remains, which drive is the best? They are all about the same size and shape; they even look pretty much similar. (Although the Western Digital is a bit more black than the others.) They weigh approximately the same at a little over 1 pound. If I removed the labels you would be hard pressed to tell them apart.

Western Digital

Hitachi

Seagate

Note: I received the Seagate drive in an OEM package, which is why there are only two photos showing just the drive itself.

I know from personal experience, that buying a hard drive is mainly determined by poor past experiences. Unlike many products out there, we have a tendency to base our buying decisions not on what is best, but by not buying what we dislike. Anyone who has had catastrophic drive failure I doubt will buy that brand again. I know I personally had a string of Western Digitals go belly up on me in the span of 1 year. Does that mean that all Western Digital drives are bad? No, but it still taints my choice when it comes down to what I buy. I would put money down that if you posed the question as to what the best hard drive is, you would find the answers to be far and varied. Let me pose this question. Why do we nit-pick every aspect of a CPU's performance, but will most likely buy the cheapest hard drive we can get our hands on? I am sure this is a generalization, but last I checked, people were more concerned with hard disk size and price than anything else. Hopefully with some testing, we can dispel some of these preconceived notions. If not, at least we can all look at a bunch of pretty numbers. Yeah!

Testing Methodologies

Now I get to the true 'meat' of the article, the testing. Since we have already determined that most hard drives look alike, only their performance will truly distinguish one from the other. The system used for testing consisted of an AMD XP3000 with an ASUS A7N8X-Deluxe motherboard. Since these drives are of the SATA II variety, I used a Promise SATA300 TX2plus PCI controller card. The driver version for this card was v1.00.0.33. Using the Promise PDCM utility I enabled TCQ/NCQ for all drives attached to it. All testing was performed on a clean Windows XP SP2 build with all current updates. All drives were formatted using the windows disk manager and yielded a drive of 465 GB usable. For the benchmarks I have chosen HD Tach, Diskbench and Iometer. NOTE: The Western Digital drive did come with a Secure-Connect SATA connector. Because this was a proprietary connector, I utilized a standard SATA cable for all testing. The same cable was used for all drives with all benchmarks.

<< Previous

Page 2 of 4

Next >>

Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: Initial Comparison & Testing Methodologies
Page 3: Testing: HDTach, IOMeter, and DiskBench
Page 4: Drive Operation & Conclusion

Subscribe to Internal Hard Drives [more info]

View All

Related Reviews

1TB Hard Drive Roundup - Update

Internal Hard Drives December 4, 2008

Western Digital Launches Caviar Black - Three Flavors of Caviar

Internal Hard Drives June 10, 2008

1TB Hard Drive Roundup

Internal Hard Drives March 27, 2008

Seagate Barracuda 750 GB SATA II Hard Drive (7200.10)

Internal Hard Drives May 20, 2007

Add Comment

5 User Comments

1 - Posted by BCSchnei on September 27, 2006 - 12:09 pm

Nice review Rich. I was wondering if you noticed any significant difference in the noise level between the drives. Did one or the other strike you as particularly loud?

I really want the quietest computer possible and waiting a few extra seconds is not something I'm too worried about if I don't have to listen to the heads trash around all the time. I'm really hoping that Samsung gets their new solid state HD's available in larger sizes. http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/09/20/conventiona...

Ben

2 - Posted by Nick on September 27, 2006 - 1:18 pm

If yer not worried about a few seconds, get a 2.5" drive. I was ghosting to one sitting open on my desk 4 feet from me and I couldn't hear it above the normal office din.

3 - Posted by Rich on September 27, 2006 - 3:06 pm

These 500GB drives are far quieter than my older PATA drives were, unfortunately, I have a lot of noisy fans, so I am not able to truely figure out which is the least noisy. That and I don't have a db meter.

4 - Posted by Darthb0b0 on September 28, 2006 - 11:25 am

I'm disappointed you tested the Seagate 7200.9 series when the 7200.10 drives have been out for awhile. The new perpendicular recording has significantly changed their performance characteristics. I'd like to see those numbers against the WD and Hitachi drives.

5 - Posted by Rich on September 28, 2006 - 12:13 pm

That is what Seagate chose to send us at the time of this writing. Although perpendicular recording technology is where the industry is headed, that is a whole new review. It will probably happen with 750GB drives when is does happen anyway. I would agree though I am very interested to see just what type of difference in speed perpendicular recording does make.

Add Comment

To add a comment without being a member, you may omit the password field, but you must enter your name (or nickname) along with your comment. * Denotes required fields.