Samsung and Seagate are each offering new high-capacity drives that strive to cram tons of data into a 3.5" form factor. Today's battle is the eco-friendly Spinpoint against the nearline Constellation, low power against business-class. Which one is best?
Benchmark Results: Throughput And Interface
Read throughput is probably the most important performance characteristic for single-user storage applications, where no or few concurrent requests happen. This is the case with external eSATA or USB 3.0 devices used for backup, archiving, and high capacity storage. NAS devices also belong to this category, but these are usually bottlenecked by the gigabit network interface at just over 100 MB/s.
Samsung’s F3EG reaches 115 MB/s in our read throughput test, which is an average result today. The Seagate Constellation ES delivers almost 140 MB/s and, more importantly, a much better average result. Spindle speed wins.
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