Conclusion
Hitachi, Seagate or Western Digital? Seagate’s Barracuda 7200.11 is the fastest, Western Digital’s Caviar GP the most efficient, and the Deskstar 7K1000 by Hitachi is far from being left in the dust.
Here we have three drives, three product concepts, and three different outcomes. All three drives deliver decent sufficient performance to power a modern high-performance PC. Enthusiasts and power users should avoid Western Digital’s Caviar GP, as the drive wasn’t tuned to perform, but rather to be as energy efficient as possible. From this standpoint, the WD10EACS Caviar GP beats the hell out of its competitors: At only 4.2 W idle power, it requires half the power of the two other terabyte drives. If you intend to equip a datacenter with dozens or hundreds of high-capacity drives, this may very well become an important decision point. The benefits of the decreased power consumption are low heat dissipation, and the quietest acoustics of any 3.5" drive we’ve had in our test labs.
Hitachi and Seagate battle head to head when it comes to winning the heart of the enthusiast who wants as much performance as possible. The Deskstar 7K1000 still does okay in the access time and I/O performance tests, but it loses ground when it comes to transfer rates. The Barracuda 7200.11 offers the best low-level benchmark results, jumping over 100 MB/s read or write transfer rates and accessing data in an average of 12.7 ms. With the exception of access time and I/O benchmarks, it also clearly beats Western Digital’s 10,000 RPM Raptor, and sets the new standard for desktop hard drives. (It’s about time for Western Digital to come up with a new Raptor drive. Based on current technology, it should be able to regain everything that has been lost to Seagate right now.)
Anyone who just wants a reasonable high-capacity drive has to consider the Caviar GP, due to its excellent thermals and low power consumption. Users with performance ambitions should go for the Barracuda 7200.11, as it currently offers the best mix of performance, capacity and cost. What about Hitachi? The Deskstar 7K1000 requires a little facelift, but if I could get it for significantly less than the others, I wouldn’t refuse it.
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Looks like you've forgotten to remove the SATA 1 limiting jumper from the rear of the drive from the interface bandwidth results - mine gets over 200MB/s with the jumper removed.
spelling is rubbish on toms articles now.
i know, look how it says:
Samsung told us earlier this year that capacities between 1 and 2 GB should be available rather early next year
instead of "1 and 2 TiB"
almost as bad as your spelling of gangster
does it say anywhere how much these cost?
and where is gangsta misspeling in his post?
Dobby, Hard disks are sold in GB/TB units, not GiB/TiB
Darkstar
If you can't cook don't go in the kitchen...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tebibyte
Spuddy
Can't you read dobby was referring to the spelling of Gangster as "Gangsta".
Don't you all think the class of THG readership is dropping at the same rate as the authoring abilities of the THG staff... I don't know what to think personally...
heh heh :-)
Bob
P.S. All I care about with harddisks is quality control and warranty. Lets have more info on the former please!! (Perhaps THG could send in spys to work in the Chinese sweatshops that produce your precious drives for only 4.50USD equivalent per day - http://www.worldsalaries.org/china.shtml)
Any user experience with the wetern digital 1tb drive? Mine works sometimes but more often is extremely slow 12mb/s when copying from another internal SATAII drive on vista system - unusable!
Any user experience with the wetern digital 1tb drive? Mine works sometimes but more often is extremely slow 12mb/s when copying from another internal SATAII drive on vista system - unusable!
Hi m671
Install a real OS and maybe we could help you get to the route of the problem... Just kidding!! But seriously how do you expect anyone to diagnose your problems without any useful information (like your RAM size/timings, what controller you are using for the drives, what motherboard you are using and what CPU)...
Bob
P.S. I wouldn't touch the WD 1TB HD... If they can't give them a 5 year warranty then they obviously don't believe they are built to last... I will stick with Seagate despite their recent decline in manufacturing quality (maybe they are trying to hit a median level with Maxtor - lol).