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.
| Product | Review | |||
 Wester Digital WD400BB |
Read Review | |||
| Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 80 | Read Review | |||
| Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 60 | Read Review | |||
| Maxtor Diamond VL40 | Read Review | |||
| Samsung SV4084H | Read Review | |||
| Seagate U Series 5 | Read Review | |||
| Seagate Cheetah 36XL | Read Review | |||
| WD400AB | Read Review | |||
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| = Editors' Choice.
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3%
2%
