250 GB Hard Disk Drive Round-Up

[Hardware Secrets Team]

There has been a new article posted.

Title: 250 GB Hard Disk Drive Round-Up
URL: http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/592

Here is a snippet:
"When buying a hard disk drive most users are only concerned with the drive's capacity. Should you also care about performance? We compared the performance of nine mainstream 250 GB SATA-300 hard disk ..."

Comments on this article are welcome.

Best regards,
Hardware Secrets Team
http://www.hardwaresecrets.com

[est_day]

I think acces time is an important characteristic more than MB/sec.

The lower the better and wich one it is?

[Gabriel Torres]

Hello,

You are right and I should add this on future reviews.

I published the access time below as requested. Values are for Diskspeed32, HD Tach and HD Tune, respectivelly.

Hitachi T7K500: 13.1 ms. 14.1 ms. 13.4 ms
Hitachi P7K500: 18.6 ms. 18.4 ms. 18.5 ms
Seagate Barracuda ES: 13.1 ms. 12.8 ms. 12.9 ms
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 310AS: 15.4 ms. 14.9 ms. 15.1 ms
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 410AS: 15.2 ms. 15.2 ms. 15.4 ms
Maxtor DiamondMax 21: 15.3 ms. 15.0 ms. 15.2 ms
WD Caviar SE: 16.0 ms. 15.7 ms. 15.8 ms
WD Caviar SE16: 15.7 ms. 15.6 ms. 15.9 ms
Samsung HD250HJ: 13.5 ms. 13.9 ms. 13.6 ms

Conclusion: Hitachi T7K500, Seagate Barracuda ES and Samsung HD250HJ were the best on this test. Hitachi P7K500 was the worse. The rest achieved similar results.

Cheers,
Gabriel.

[hajj_3]

you should add the Western Digital 250GB RE3 to the review, it uses a 320gb platter short-stroked, it will beat all of these drives, around 97mb/s read and 11.7ms seek. The drive came out about the same time you published this review, its in shops already.

[Gabriel Torres]

I couldn't find for sale and Western Digital didn't have one for sending me.