A Quartet Of 500 GB HDDs Under $60

Throughput, Interface Performance

The throughput results are very clear: Hitachi is best of the class at up to 111.7 MB/s read throughput, followed by Seagate’s Barracuda 7200.11 and the year-old Samsung Spinpoint F. WD’s Caviar Blue is last here.

Write performance results are similar. Hitachi is unmatched, while Samsung does still well and would do better if the 500 GB drive performed like its terabyte drive. Unfortunately that’s not the case.

The interface throughput reflects the maximum bandwidth the drive would be capable of handling, by measuring throughput to the drive’s cache memory. This result is almost irrelevant in everyday life unless there is a bottleneck that would somehow limit bandwidth.