Testing and Performance
Seagate: Can There Be Only One?
What's this
We set up a bench test system comprised of the following components:
·        Intel Core i5-3570K (up to 3.8 GHz, 6 MB cache)
·        Intel D77GA-70K motherboard (w/ integrated Intel HD Graphics 4000)
·        Corsair 8 GB (2 x 4 GB) 1600 MHz CMZ8GX3M2A1600C8 8-8-8-24
·        240 GB Patriot Wildfire SSD
·        PC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool 860W
·        Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
·        All BIOS, driver, and firmware versions current as of 10/5/2012
With that in hand, we configured each hard drive in turn as a secondary storage volume and conducted four benchmark tests on it: ATTO Disk Benchmark, CrystalDiskMark 3, Iometer (6/22/08 RC2), and PCMark 7 build 1.0.4.
ATTO Disk Benchmark

ATTO Disk benchmark tests storage targets with various data transfer (cluster) sizes and lengths. As you can see, larger cluster sizes tend to be faster because they transfer more information per cluster, but they also waste more disk space. Beyond the 8K to 16K range, hard drive performance tends to flatline. In each case, we ran the total test length to 1 GB with a queue depth of 4.
After compiling our initial set of data, we ran everything again, because it just didn’t make sense for the WD Black to be so far behind the other three drives, especially the Green. But the results held firm. Anyone who has done benchmarking for a while knows that synthetic tests such as ATTO can offer unexpected and odd results that may conflict with other tests. All tests must be considered together for a general consensus.
CrystalDiskMark 3
For desktop users, sequential read/write numbers tend to be of particular interest. Watching video or playing music, for example, is a sequential read operation. Copying a multi-gigabyte folder to a drive is one kind of sequential write. While any given application may not demand enough bandwidth to overwhelm a drive’s capabilities, these tests give clues about how drives might perform in the face of several such concurrent demands.
Again, we see this benchmark cast the WD Black into an inexplicably underwhelming light while the middle of the road WD Blue wins the chart from top to bottom. Seagate’s Barracuda comes in a very close second, trailing the Blue by only about 3 MB/s on sequential operations—a difference not likely to be noticed by an end user.