Shop for All
|
Prestige Portable 500GB 2.5" Hard... |
Compare the top 5 lowest prices by hovering your mouse over the product names on the left |
$105.99 |
|
Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB Hard Drive | $139.99 | |
|
My Passport Essential Black... | $129.99 | |
|
Elements External 1 TB Hard Drive | $109.00 | |
|
Caviar GP 750GB Hard Drive | $89.99 |
All performance charts
- hard disk review
- hard disk comparison
- hard drive roundup
- hard drive performance comparison
- seagate western digital comparison
- external hard disk comparison
- roundup hard drive laptop
- hitachi hard disk review
- external storage review
- comparison of hard drives
- future hard drive capacity
- external hard drive roundup
- hard disk roundup
- hard disk speed comparison
- disk drive comparison
Partners
The Games selection
violent :
Friday the 24th
Exterminate Santa Claus's elves. Use the arrows to move, S to grab the elves, and A or W to attack them with your sword.
|
violent :
Interactive Buddy
Unwind on your interactive buddy: Do anything you want to him, it will earn you money, and you can buy other stuff to torture him with.
|
Sponsored links
Round-Up: Comparison Testing of 22 Hard Disk Drives
Table of contents
- 1 – Let The Games Begin!
- 2 – The View From The Top
- 3 – A Stagnant Market?
- 4 – Buying Advice
- 5 – Serial ATA Drives
- 6 – Hitachi DeskStar 7K250: Former Champ
- 7 – Hitachi DeskStar T7K250: 250 GB Champion
- 8 – Hitachi DeskStar 7K500: Capacity Monster
- 9 – Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 80 GB (6Y080M0)
- 10 – DiamondMax Plus 9 250 GB (6Y250M0): Robust But Quiet
- 11 – DiamondMax Plus 10 300 GB (6B300S0): Solid Performer
- 12 – Seagate Barracuda ATA 7200.7 160 GV SATA NCQ (ST3120827AS)
- 13 – Seagate Barracuda ATA 7200.8: Two Faces To Show
- 14 – Western Digital WD360 Raptor: The Pioneer
- 15 – Western Digital WD740 Raptor: Fastest Of All SATA Drives
- 16 – Western Digital WD2500JD: The Old Guard
- 17 – Western Digital WD2500KS: SATA II Model
- 18 – Western Digital WD3200JD
- 19 – UltraATA Hard Drives
- 20 – Hitachi DeskStar 7K250
- 21 – Hitachi DeskStar T7K250: This Model T Takes The Prize
- 22 – Seagate Barracuda ATA 7200.7 120 GB: The Classic Model
- 23 – Seagate Barracuda ATA 7200.8: The Upgrade Drive
- 24 – Western Digital WD1000BB: First 100 GB Drive
- 25 – Western Digital WD2000JB
- 26 – Western Digital WD3200JB: Price/performance Leader
- 27 – Test Setup
- 28 – Data Transfer Diagrams, Continued
- 29 – Data Transfer Diagrams, Continued
- 30 – Data Transfer Diagrams, Continued
- 31 – Data Transfer Diagrams, Continued
- 32 – Data Transfer Diagrams, Continued
- 33 – I/O Performance
- 34 – Performance Measurements
- 35 – Performance Measurements, Continued
- 36 – PCMark HD Benchmarks
- 37 – Summary And Conclusions: Current Drives Are Fast Drives
- 38 – More on this topic
The jockeying for position among hard drive makers never seems to end, particularly in the areas of drive capacity and speed. As a result, hard disks have nearly doubled their capabilities over the last few years, in contrast to the performance of CPUs and systems as a whole. But that's no mere anomaly; we expect further improvements and enhancements in the immediate future.
This market is dominated by a handful of vendors that together offer the majority of 3.5" drives for desktop computers: Hitachi, Maxtor, Samsung, Seagate and Western Digital. Vendors such as ExcelStor also play a supporting role in this market, but their products are based on technology that originates with Hitachi.
Maxtor, Seagate and WD also offer external disk drives, ready to hook up to PCs using USB or Firewire ports. This is a logical strategy; the market for conventional 3.5" drives isn't growing as vigorously as it once did, which makes cultivation of additional market niches essential. These offerings not only provide external storage options for backup and flexible data repositories, but also come in smaller form factors too, from 2.5" down to 1". This review does not cover these more petite offerings, however.
When it comes to buying a hard disk, users tend to weigh three factors most heavily: the tradeoff between cost and capacity; performance capability and built-in features and functions; and the vendor's reputation. Other important factors include noise output and heat dissipation, both of which have been the subject of serious improvements in recent years. In general, all drives are pretty quiet these days; other than a quiet hum or whirr from the spindle, only drive head movements contribute to noise output.
Hard disk tests are nothing new for THG, but what's been missing until now has been a general round-up of the models available in today's market. That's why in this test we looked at not only a sizable number of actual drives, we also made sure we covered a good representative selection of makes and models. This will help make a performance comparison across this rather considerable board of candidates as meaningful as possible. All drives had to survive our new test battery, which consists of multiple types of benchmarks and tests.
- Doc SIS 2.0 Cable Modem With Mac Filtering Round Up! [TomsNetworking]
- Excel 2007 Bug - Wrong Round up [Applications]
- Belkin 24 inch Ultra ATA Hard Drive round cables look good.. [Windows 95/98/ME]
- Round Robin RIS [Windows 2000/NT]
- Won't connect 2nd time round [Windows XP]
Questions? Ask Tom's community!
Sponsored links
Related forums topics
- AMD Phenom II 940 "Xtremely" Benchmarked
- New CPU won't fit in the socket!
- How the CoolerMaster CM HAF 932?
- I was offered a free 9950 BE
- Q6600 High Temps
- GUIDE: Overclocking On EP/P35-DS3L v1.3.1 [UPDATED: 10/2/2008]
- Core 2 Quad and Duo Temperature Guide
- HOWTO: Overclock C2Q (Quads) and C2D (Duals) - Guide v1.6.1
- Reading cpu temps in CoreTemp and RealTemp?
- Q6600 different core temps
- Question about starting pc after OC
- Random reboot/reboot loops! Vista 64/ram??/mobo??
- Abit gigabyte amd 64
- Asus P5K P35 Chipset boot problem!!!