Data Transfer Rates
It is amazing to see that a two-year old high-end drive performs almost like a notebook drive today in terms of data transfer. The maximum of 16.8 MB/s is less than half the performance today's drives are able to provide. Even the IDE drive (DeskStar 75GXP) performs twice as good.
There is a clear difference between the new Fujitsu drive and the DeskStar 75GXP. As mentioned in the article summary, I'm not quite sure if the 10,000 RPM-drive MAJ3364MC could still prevail if the DTLA was running at 10,000 RPM as well.
Disk Access Time
Thanks to the high rotation speed, the Quantum Atlas 10K II and the new Fujitsu MAJ3364MC are below 9 ms - that is an excellent result. Since the UltraStar 9 ZX has a lower data density, the access time is naturally a bit higher. The 11.1 ms scored by the DTLA are also a remarkable result for a 7,200 rpm desktop drive.
In terms of access time, the technical development has not been too huge. For example data base applications will not run much faster if you exchange a two-years old hard drive with an actual one, because those applications depend much more on fast accesses than on high bandwidth.
