Hitachi vs. Western Digital vs. Seagate: A Battle of the Mammoths
by Purav Sanghani on December 2, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Introduction
When Hitachi first introduced their 500GB hard disk drives, we thought that it would take forever for them to actually begin manufacturing the units, which was not the case. We gave Hitachi the credit for being the first manufacturer to put out the largest hard disk drive ever, but we couldn’t really gauge its performance, since there were really no other drives to which to compare it.
Last month, Seagate officially announced their 7200.9 line of desktop hard disk drives and we had a chance to look at their largest unit in the line, the 500GB Barracuda. During our tech briefing with the 7200.9 product manager, we learned that the line was the end result of combining the two previous lines, the 7200.7 and the 7200.8. The joining of forces led to the 7200.9 name and included all of the capacities from the previous two.
Again, we could not really compare Seagate’s 500GB unit with any of the other drives that we had benchmarked and so, we were determined to get our hands on the largest units on the market today. Hitachi and Seagate were held to have the largest capacities at 500GB and we threw in Western Digital’s 400GB unit for kicks.
Here’s how the drives weigh in…
The WD4000YR is only a 1.5 Gb/sec drive, but we’re including it to compare performance between it and the newer 3.0 Gb/sec units. And since it is Western Digital’s new high capacity model, we thought, why not take a peek at its performance as well and to see which drive gives us more bang for the buck.
When Hitachi first introduced their 500GB hard disk drives, we thought that it would take forever for them to actually begin manufacturing the units, which was not the case. We gave Hitachi the credit for being the first manufacturer to put out the largest hard disk drive ever, but we couldn’t really gauge its performance, since there were really no other drives to which to compare it.
Last month, Seagate officially announced their 7200.9 line of desktop hard disk drives and we had a chance to look at their largest unit in the line, the 500GB Barracuda. During our tech briefing with the 7200.9 product manager, we learned that the line was the end result of combining the two previous lines, the 7200.7 and the 7200.8. The joining of forces led to the 7200.9 name and included all of the capacities from the previous two.
Again, we could not really compare Seagate’s 500GB unit with any of the other drives that we had benchmarked and so, we were determined to get our hands on the largest units on the market today. Hitachi and Seagate were held to have the largest capacities at 500GB and we threw in Western Digital’s 400GB unit for kicks.
Here’s how the drives weigh in…
| Capacity | Platter Density | # of Platters / Heads | Spindle speed (RPM) | Average Seek Time | Average Latency | Interface | Buffer Sizes | |
| Hitachi 7K500 | 500GB | 100GB | 5 / 10 | 7200 | 8.5ms | 4.17ms | PATA / SATA 3.0Gb/sec | 16MB |
| Seagate 7200.9 500GB | 500GB | 125GB | 4 / 8 | 7200 | 8.5ms | 4.16ms | PATA / SATA 3.0Gb/sec | 16MB |
| Western Digital WD4000YR | 400GB | 100GB | 4 / 8 | 7200 | 8.7ms | 4.2ms | PATA / SATA 1.5Gb/sec | 16MB |
The WD4000YR is only a 1.5 Gb/sec drive, but we’re including it to compare performance between it and the newer 3.0 Gb/sec units. And since it is Western Digital’s new high capacity model, we thought, why not take a peek at its performance as well and to see which drive gives us more bang for the buck.
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Griswold - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
I can understand mentioning AGP, but PCI? You gotta be kidding me... that bus is such a bottleneck. You dont even have to run PCI cards to find out, just stress all the on-board stuff on a feature rich mobo and you'll notice it too.
Cygni - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
Which explains the rush from the mfts to get PCI-Ex cards out the door. :p Really, the only 2 cards that i can see benifiting from the PCI Express bus are high level RAID cards and gigabit ethernet... both of which are being fully integrated into southbridges anyway.Hikari - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
You said AGP and PCI, not AGP and PCIe. Obviously there isn't a lot of difference between the latter, but there is quite a bit of difference between the former.Griswold - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
They are integrated into southbridge and still utilize the PCI bus mostly. PCI bus aint only the slot you see on your mobo, you know..Anton74 - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
High level RAID? A single PATA drive has an interface speed identical to that of the PCI bus (133MB/s) these days, all by itself. And then there's SATA with 150MB/s and 300MB/s interface speeds now. Not to mention the PCI bus is usually shared with a multitude of devices, all wanting some bandwidth.puffpio - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
It seems anomalous that the Western Digital Raptor 10000RPM drive is sooo much slower in the Doom 3 level load test compared to all the other drives. It sticks out like a sore thumb. It doesn't make sense because it had been dominating the other tests...