500GB Hard Drive Round-Up

Reviews: Storage

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Richard Poelling
Kurtis
N/A
Sep. 26, 2006

Specifications

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Introduction

I have discussed the perils of storage before. Like with money, the more you get, the more you want! And the storage industry has been all too happy to feed our growing need to stash our digital junk. Personal video players, media PCs, DVRs, and MP3 players all make it easier to generate large files (and lots of them). Add to that falling digital camera prices (and increases in resolution) and you now have a slew of digital pictures to store.

Yes, a lot of this stuff can be backed up to CD or to increasingly popular DVDs, but few people actually back up their data regularly. So, in the end, it comes down to a demand for bigger hard drives. Never mind the fact that the operating systems we use are approaching gargantuan sizes (yes, Vista, I am talking about you), and most computer games are in the realm 2-5 GB each. Our hard drives don't stand a chance. Or do they?

As platter densities have increased, we have watched our drives grow. 20, 40, 80, 120, 250, and now 500GB drives are in the mainstream. Larger ones are starting to show up, but the 500 GB variety is gaining popularity. All the big players are in the market. It is these 500 GB monsters that I have with me today. From Western Digital I have their Caviar SE16 (WD5000KS), from Hitachi I have their Deskstar 7K500 (HDS725050KLA360), and from Seagate the Barracuda 7200.9 (ST3500641AS). Each are SATA II, 7200 RPM drives with 16MB of cache.

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

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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.

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