Three Generations Of 1.8" Hard Drives Benchmarked

Efficiency And Performance Index

We calculate efficiency by dividing performance by power in watts used. We split this discipline to sequential read and workstation I/O workloads.

Streaming read efficiency has more than doubled from 2008 and the 160GB drive to 2010 and the latest 320GB model. This means that the drives have become much faster while also having introduced performance savings.

There are also noticeable benefits for I/O efficiency. Since I/O performance didn’t change too much. There are clear physical limits at which the heads can be relocated, and power goes up a bit for the 320GB drive. Efficiency is best for the 250GB in this particular workload. Keep in mind that this is of little relevance for PC and media player applications.

Finally, the desktop performance index is calculated across all our benchmarks, weighting throughput and applications higher than I/O performance.