Western Digital WD1600AAJS: 160GB Served on Single Platter

Hard Disk Performance: HDTach

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We find HDTach to be useful for generating random access and average read rate results in a very consistent manner. Although the burst rates and CPU utilization numbers are interesting they tend to be meaningless in actual application performance comparisons.

The Western Digital Caviar SE 160GB has the highest average sequential read speed of 68.7MB/s with the Western Digital drive averaging 64.1MB/s in our direct comparison today. Our Maxtor DiamondMax 17 160GB drive trails at a still respectable 56.5MB/s. In previous testing our WD Raptor 150 led the field with a 75.4MB/s average, the Seagate 7200.10 750GB at 66.9MB/s, WD RE2 500GB drive at 62.4MB/s, WD RE2 400GB drive at 57.0MB/s, and the WD RE16 250GB drive at 51.4MB/s.

The random access time benchmark still favors the 10,000RPM spindle speed of the Raptor which generates a result of 8.6ms. The average rotational latency at 10,000 RPM is 3ms while the average rotational latency at 7200 RPM is 4.17ms; what this means is that the head seek speed on the Raptor is also significantly faster (~5.6ms) than the other drives (9.2-10.0ms). However, the Maxtor trails significantly in random access time posting a score of 19.2ms compared to 13.6ms on the WD drive. There appears to be a problem with the Maxtor unit in this particular test, as both drives advertise the same seek latency; we are still looking into the situation but expect this to have an impact on some of the results.

In our sequential read speed results the WD 160GB drive finishes around the 40MB/s mark at the end of the disk and the Maxtor at 31MB/s. In contrast, the WD Raptor finishes with a 52MB/s result that is more than 30% greater than the 7200 RPM drives. Although the WD 160GB drive has very good burst and random access rates we will soon see this does not always translate into class leading performance.

Hard Disk Performance: HD Tune





The HD Tune performance results between each drive mirror the HDTach results. The two programs each report slightly different results but the net result is that the WD drive provides better random access and sustained transfer rates than the Maxtor drive.