A Quartet Of 500 GB HDDs Under $60

Access Time, I/O Performance

The access time values are mostly reflected and confirmed in our I/O testing, where Western Digital does best, followed by Seagate. Samsung and Hitachi have to share the third and fourth position. A high number of I/O operations per second is important if you intend to run multiple applications at the same time. It also matters if you want to have little interference in your daily work while background services (such as anti-virus tools) are accessing data on the hard drive—this causes frequent variable access.