5 years ago when I built my computer I put in a top of the line Western Digital VelociRaptor 74GB 10,000 RPM hard drive for $184. Although the VelociRaptor has never failed me, it is a far cry from the obscenity it represented 5 years ago. Over the past year I have had to micromanage the dwindling space on my hard drive by vigilantly deleting old downloads and programs, but no more!
For $173 I got my hands on Western Digital’s Caviar Black 2TB 7,200 RPM hard drive. Only 7,200 RPM won’t that be slower? Nay, the higher data density more than compensates for the slower RPM. Here are the benchmarks using HD Tune Pro (free trial).
Western Digital VelociRaptor 74GB
Transfer Rate Minimum : 9.5 MB/s
Transfer Rate Maximum: 68.6 MB/s
Transfer Rate Average: 58.4 MB/s
Access Time: 8.0 ms
Burst Rate: 114.0 MB/s
Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB
Transfer Rate Minimum: 68.0 MB/s
Transfer Rate Maximum: 139.5 MB/s
Transfer Rate Average: 108.1 MB/s
Access Time: 12.0 ms
Burst Rate: 206.6 MB/s
A few interesting things to note:
- You can tell that my old hard drive has a few bad sectors by downward spikes (my S.M.A.R.T. log says that I have 9 reallocated sectors)
- On a large disk, the performance difference between the inner tracks and the outer tracks is significant
- The worse case read speed of the new hard drive is still better than the best case of my old hard drive
Whenever I get around to building my next dream machine, this hard drive will definitely get moved there. It is a great capacity hard drive with performance that is only exceeded by solid state hard drives.
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