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-------------------------------------------------------------- This story was printed from ZDNet Australia. --------------------------------------------------------------
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High-capacity hard drives August 31, 2001 URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/reviews/hardware/storage/soa/High-capacity-hard-drives/0,139023427,120222556,00.htm
RMIT IT Test Lab looks at and compares hard drives with capacities above 35GB. Last year we were looking at 20GB hard drives and were saying those drives were huge in comparison to what we had previously come across. Right now we are starting to see 30GB drives being fitted in standard new machines. For this review we looked at 35+ GB drives. There are many 35+ GB drives out there that will make their way into your next or current PC. While most of the drives we received were around 40GB, we also received one 60GB drive and one whopping 80GB drive from Maxtor. All the drives were IDE except for one 36GB SCSI we received from Seagate. It would be quite unfair to directly compare this single SCSI drive against all the IDE drives--the SCSI drive spins up to 10,000RPM and uses an Ultra 160 SCSI interface. Five out of the seven IDE drives that we tested spun at 5400RPM and the other two at 7200RPM. All the IDE drives feature an Ultra ATA 100 interface. Even though all of the IDE drives are Ultra ATA 100 drives there are many other factors that will contribute to their performance. Things like seek times, spindle speeds, and buffer sizes all make a big difference to the overall performance. To test that performance we ran both WinBench Business Disk and High-End Disk benchmarks. The Business Disk tests reflect business type applications such as Corel Word Perfect, Lotus Smart Suite, Microsoft Office, and Netscape. The High-End Disk tests draws upon various graphics and audio applications like Photoshop, Premiere, and Sound Forge.
Editor's Choice Out of all the 40GB drives there was one clear winner--the Western Digital WD400BB. We also decided to make the WD400BB the overall winner. It was the fastest overall IDE drive and it represents pretty good value. It's only $385, which works out to be $9.62 per Gbyte. If you're after a very large capacity drive then the Maxtor Diamond Max Plus 80 is the way to go. It's not very fast and if you were after a faster hard drive you would look elsewhere. If you were on a tight budget and your also not that concerned about speed then the Samsung would be your best bet. Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 80The Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 80 featured the largest capacity of any of the drives in our comparison. A whole 81GB was sectored over four platters.
The drive's 2MB buffer size was pretty standard for an IDE drive (the SCSI drive was the only one to have a larger buffer size). In WinBench Business Disk the DiamondMax Plus 80 did quite well to score a little past 9000 and in the WinBench High End Disk test the DiamondMax 80 scored right on 20,000. Overall, the DiamondMax Plus 80 is a good performer. Keep in mind that this is only a 5400RPM drive. And because of this, its access times were slightly higher than the faster spinning drives--we recorded a score of 21.6. In the transfer tests, the DiamondMax Plus 80 (along with the Maxtor VL 40) generated a good smooth graph which indicates smooth operation. Cost per gigabyte was very good at only $7.39. This made it only 56 cents more than the Samsung, which offered the best price per GB.
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 60
The Maxtor DiamondMax 60 is a 7200RPM drive that has a capacity of 60GB. It was one of only two 7200RPM drives we tested, and it was also one of the two IDE drives that cost over $500. The DiamondMax Plus 60 is $50 cheaper than the DiamondMax Plus 80 but it is a lot faster. It was actually the second-fastest IDE drive behind the Western Digital WD400BB. The DiamondMax Plus 60 had a seek time of less than 8.7ms--the fastest of all the IDE drives. It also featured three platters and six heads and it was beaten (narrowly) only by the WD400BB in all the speed tests. One advantage it did have over the WD400BB was that it cost less per gigabyte: just $9.15. (Overall, the 7200RPM drives cost a couple of dollars more per GB than the 5400RPM drives.) The transfer graphs showed how the transfer rates fell away gradually but we were more concerned over all the hiccups. The drive did not operate very smoothly and (as you can see from the figures) there are visible glitches in a few areas.
Maxtor Diamond VL 40 The Maxtor Diamond VL 40 is the smallest Maxtor drive we received for the test. It's a 40.9GB drive, which is still quite large by today's standards. The VL 40 performed very similarly to the huge DiamondMax Plus 80 disk drive. Its WinBench Business Disk score was a bit higher but its score in WinBench High-End Disk was lower. The access times for both the Plus 80 and VL 40 were also similar. The VL 40 stood out from the rest because it had one of the smoothest transfer rate graphs that we saw. The transfer speeds dropped slightly throughout the test (as expected) but most importantly, they remained smooth.
The VL 40 is equipped with a 2MB buffer. It has four 10GB surfaces (or two 20GB platters and four heads). Like all the other IDE drives it features an ATA/100 interface. Its price of $299 made it one of the more affordable hard disks in this roundup, and brought down its cost per GB to only $7.31.
Samsung SV4084H
The Samsung drive was the least expensive drive we tested--it was priced at only $279. It's a 40.8GB hard disk and that works out to $6.83 per GB (this was the best price per GB of the drives in the roundup). The Samsung spins at 5400RPMs and has two platters and four surfaces. Each surface can hold up to 10GB and one head services each surface. The Samsung had a seek time of 9.0ms and a buffer size of only 512KB. This significantly affected its performance in the WinBench Business and High End Disk tests. It only managed to score 6160 in Business Disk and below 15,000 in High-End Disk. The Samsung, however, scored very well in the CPU utilisation test--better than any other IDE drive and even better than the SCSI drive. Its access times weren't too bad either. A score of 14.5 put it up there with the fastest drives.
Seagate U Series 5
The Seagate U Series 5 hard drive has a black rubber-like glove that protects the chassis. (This also may actually make it a little quieter as well.) This Seagate was one of the slower drives in our roundup--it was only slightly faster than the Samsung drive. It didn't score over 10,000 in Business Disk and it just scored under 20,000 in High-End Disk. Its access times were quite high and its score in the CPU utilisation test was a little higher than most but overall none of the drives relied too much on the CPU anyway. This drive also has a 512KB buffer like the Samsung but the Seagate had a faster average seek time, which made it a little faster than the Samsung drive. The Seagate U Series 5 drive was priced at only $281. This made it the second least expensive hard disk. It also offered the second best price per GB at $7.04.
Seagate Cheetah 36XL The Cheetah was the only SCSI drive that we tested. It has an Ultra160 interface which means you can sustain transfer rates of 160 megabits per second. This drive also spins at an incredible 10,000RPM. It has a formatted capacity of 36.7GB and Seagate claims that this drive is 15 percent faster than the previous generation of Cheetah drives. It's a pity we didn't receive any other SCSI drives to put it up against. The transfer graphs looked quite good for the Cheetah drive. The Cheetah sustained some smooth transfers and it even sustained good high transfer rates for the most part of the test.
The Cheetah scored well over what any IDE drive could manage. However, when we look at its overall price and cost per gigabyte its appeal fades. The Cheetah costs $1297, which works out to $35 per GB. There is a definite performance advantage over the IDE drives but where you will really see why a SCSI drive is well worth the money is in an applications server where you need lots of disks. Another advantage is the ability to use RAID 5. You cannot set up RAID 5 with IDE drives.
The WD400AB is a 5400RPM IDE hard disk drive, which has a capacity of 40GB. The WD400AB was the third-fastest IDE drive. It scored slightly over 10,000 in Winbench Business Disk and a bit over 20,000 in Winbench High-End Disk. It has three 13GB surfaces and only three heads (one of the two platters has an unused surface). Because the drive was running at only 5400RPMs and not any faster they were able to have higher density surfaces. The WD400AB has a 2MB buffer like its faster brother, the 7200RPM WD400BB. This also means that it has a higher average seek time then the WD400BB. Its direct competitor is the Maxtor Diamond VL 40. The Maxtor was a little slower in all the tests but is $16 cheaper overall. But for an extra $16 it's worth going for the faster hard drive.
The WD400BB is a 40GB hard disk drive that has a rotational speed of 7200RPM. It's priced at only $385 and its cost per GB is $9.62--slightly more than the other 7200RPM hard disk, the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 60. But then again, the Maxtor is much larger than the WD400BB and you can generally expect the cost per GB to come down with larger drives.
The WD400BB has a seek time of 8.9ms. This is slightly slower than the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 60. They both have 2MB buffer sizes and the only difference between the two on paper is the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 60 has an extra disk and two additional heads to read the two extra surfaces. The WD400BB was easily the fastest IDE drive that we tested. It beat all the other IDE drives in WinBench Business Disk and High-End Disk. It even had the fastest access time out of all the IDE drives. The one area that it did lose out was in the CPU test, its score was a little high but this should not deter you from this drive.
The transfer graphs were very interesting for this drive. The WD400BB maintained some high transfer rates but the graphs were not very smooth. It seems that this drive would have been calibrating its heads more than most which would have made the transfers hiccup a lot of the time. This may have affected its scores in many of the other tests but it still remained one of the fastest drives on the block.
HOW WE TESTED Hard Drives The test PC consisted of an MSI 815E Pro motherboard, Pentium III 866, 128MB of SDRAM and a 64MB Hercules 3D Prophet II Ultra graphics card. All drives were tested under Windows 2000 Professional. A fresh and identical disk image was loaded onto each hard drive. We then ran WinBench 99 V1.2 Business and High-End disk tests. We also ran the WinBench Disk Inspection tests on all of the drives. The list of programs emulated in the Business Disk tests is as follows:
For the High-End disk tests a different set of applications is used to emulate disk behaviour. The set consists of the following:
Disk Inspection Tests The Disk Inspection Tests measures the hard disks Access Times, CPU Utilization and Transfer Rates.
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Wester Digital WD400BB
