Energy-Saving Hard Drives

Benchmarks, Continued

Access Time

Clearly, Hitachi limits seek performance in an effort to keep maximum power consumption low. An 18.7 ms average access time is even slow for 2.5” hard drives. That’s not an issue for storage servers or consumer applications, but for desktop use, the WD drives provide clearly better access performance.

Interface Performance

The interface throughput is a mandatory test to verify the technical specifications, but it has little relevance to real-life performance. Interface performance is only interesting when the drive can read or write from or into the local cache memory.

Read/Write Throughput

Hitachi’s Deskstar P7K500 provides the best sequential throughput, as it runs at 7,200 RPM as opposed to 5,400+ RPM with Western Digital (the firm doesn’t provide detailed information). However, other 7,200 RPM drives such as the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 or the Samsung Spinpoint F1 reach at least 100 MB/s, while Hitachi maxes out at 87 MB/s and WD is limited to 84 MB/s.