HD Tune / HD Tach


Click to enlarge

In HD Tune 2.53, the Western Digital drive turns in an average sustained transfer rate of 73.0MB/s, which measures up very well against its peers. In our labs, this has been the fastest result we've recorded to date - very encouraging indeed! The 13.2ms access time reported by HD Tune is merely adequate, landing squarely within the ranks of its peers.

HD Tach clocks the sequential read speed of the 7500AAKS at an average rate of 77.1MB/s, a score again puts the WD7500AAKS above its peers. The Seagate 7200.10 750GB drive, for example, scores 66.9MB/s. The WD7500AAKS even beats the 150GB Western Digital Raptor in this test by nearly 2MB/second, which is no mean feat.

However, it is important to note that access times, average read rates, and burst rate measurements are basically synthetic measurements, and while important these are not "true" application measurements. There is a great deal of potential bottlenecks elsewhere in the system that can and will affect the true performance of a drive. Although these "benchmarks" are a good indicator of a drive's performance, it is the total make-up of components in the PC that will determine the drive's actual performance.

Test Hardware and Software Acoustics and Thermals
Comments Locked

37 Comments

View All Comments

  • bigpow - Thursday, August 9, 2007 - link

    signs of times..

    when we no longer perceived Made in China as a bad thing, I've been hearing that it's actually preferred over the recent streams of Made in Thailand electronics.

    It happened to Japan & Taiwan before, now most people are happy to see those labels when they buy something.

    And of course, the cool-er things in life are still Made in USA ;)

    -Not that where something is produced has anything to do with the quality.
  • Googer - Thursday, August 9, 2007 - link

    I noticed the Western Digital Raptor 150 was missing from this chart:

    http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/wd750_080807108...">http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/wd750_080807108...
  • Gary Key - Thursday, August 9, 2007 - link

    I have no idea why, but after hitting our engine update button again, it is there now. :)
  • Googer - Thursday, August 9, 2007 - link

    In your benchmarking, you did not mention the size of the swapfile you have your OS set to use. I am sure it has an effect on application throughput. A static sized file is needed for benchmarking consistency.
  • Gary Key - Thursday, August 9, 2007 - link

    Our standard swapfile is fixed at 2048MB and we clean the prefetch folder after each benchmark run.
  • imaheadcase - Thursday, August 9, 2007 - link

    You can fill a WHS with 6 1TB drives for so cheap it will be great! Acoustics and heat will be a selling point for lots of people what that comes around.
  • yyrkoon - Monday, August 13, 2007 - link

    Heh, have you ever owned a 'Deathstar' ? Many, including myself will never venture down that road again.
  • Martimus - Wednesday, August 15, 2007 - link

    I have avoided IBM drives after mine died on me after only about one year. Of course Hitachi bought them out, but I don't know if they have any better longevity than they used to.
  • strikeback03 - Tuesday, August 14, 2007 - link

    An Emachines computer I bought a few years ago had a Deskstar drive. Other than the anti-static meowing noise, no problems with it for the 3 years I owned it.
  • mostlyprudent - Thursday, August 9, 2007 - link

    I am most impressed at how well the Hitachi 1TB drive continues to sit at the top of so many of the benchmarks.

    Your conclusion stating how well the WD drive does against the Seagate omitted the point raised in the Samsung article recently posted here. That is, Seagate's drive is almost a year older and their new 7200.11 drives are just around the corner.

    Overall, it is impressive to see how tightly grouped these drive are. There seems very little reason to even consider a Raptor anymore.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now