by Rob Williams on May 17, 2006 in Storage
Seagate has introduced to us once again the largest consumer drive available, and we have it on our testbench. Surprisingly, not only does it have much more space than the previous 500GB model, it also proves to be much faster. Let’s take a close look at the drive, and see just what perpendicular magnetic recording can offer us.
HD Tach is one of my favorite storage benchmarks, mainly because it’s quite in-depth. It can give you a result for a burst rate, average and a latency.
We can see that the 750GB drive doesn’t have the incredible burst rate of the 500GB, but it’s still very impressive. The 750GB did conquer though, especially in the average read part. Whereas the 500GB fell short performance wise to the 160GB, the 750GB proves faster than both, while maintaining the nice latencies.
HD Tune 2.52
HD Tune is not just a benchmark, but a great tool for checking up on your drives health. Under the health panel, it will be able to tell you how many hours your hard drive has been running for. The benchmarking portion can give us similar info as HD Tach 3, but instead of a simple average, it can also give us a minimum and maximum.
The same applies to our HD Tune benchmarks. Here though, the 750GB drive proved 17MB/s faster on average. That’s a huge difference performance wise. It’s apparent that despite the wider density of the 750GB drive, the PMR helps maintain some great speed.