Performance vs. Capacity

Hard drives are made up of one or more circular platters. Platters are written from the outside inward in order to maximize performance (you cover more data in a single rotation of an outer track vs an inner track). As was the case in our Seagate 3TB review I had to turn to HD Tune as HD Tach doesn't support 64-bit LBAs:

Maximum read performance is 130MB/s while maximum write speed is 121.7MB/s. The minimum speed you'll get out of the drive is ~55MB/s at its inner most tracks.

Sequential & Random Read/Write Speed Overall System Performance using PCMark Vantage
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  • krumme - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link

    Can we perhaps see this in a My Book World Edition?

    Thanx for the fine HD reviews Anand
  • ervinshiznit - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link

    So with the 32 bit LBA restriction, does this mean that its possible to boot from a partition on a 3TB drive as long as that partition is no larger than 2.1TB?
  • davepermen - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link

    And it's especially nice that the old small 2TB drives are now really cheap. Put a new one to celebrate into my windows home server. The 3TB ones won't be supported for whs1 anyways, so it's cheap 2TB drives from now on.

    Then, when the 3TB will be in the same price/gb ratio, the next disk will be needed, and whs2 will be there, supporting them.

    And yes, storage (in my case, networked storage thanks to whs) + ssd in the systems is definitely the best setup. 100% agreed.
  • ratbert1 - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link

    "The controller supports booting to a 3TB formatted drive if your motherboard has EFI support."
    The chart shows support for boot with 64 bit Vista and 7 with the HBA controller. If you have 32 bit, you can use it as a data drive.
  • SteelCity1981 - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link

    It's totally pointless to make 6gb platter hard drives. At least WD understands that.
  • Taft12 - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link

    Nobody makes 6GB/platter drives... at least not since 1999!
  • SteelCity1981 - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - link

    I'm talking speed not size duh.
  • Roland00Address - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link

    Western Digital Caviar Black WD6402AAEX 640GB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5"
    Western Digital Caviar Black WD1002FAEX 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5"
    Western Digital VelociRaptor WD4500HLHX 450GB 10000 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5"
    Western Digital VelociRaptor WD6000HLHX 600GB 10000 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5"
  • bennyg - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link

    If you were uninformed, you would think a SATA 6GBPS 3TB HDD is faster than a SATA 3GBPS 3TB HDD. So marketing people think it's very useful.
  • ytoledano1 - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link

    In most cases, data is lost due to user error, virus, theft or fire - RAID1 protects against none of these. RAID1 will protect you against disk failure, but its main advantage is in mission-critical servers where you don't want to reboot the machine when replacing a drive. How many desktop users need this feature?

    Worst, people might think that their data is backed up 'cause their disk is redundant. It's not.

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