1TB Evolves: New Drives, More Speed

Access Time and Interface Bandwidth

The results are a bit surprising here. Western Digital achieves excellent access time results of only 12.2 ms. This is much faster than most of the other 7,200 RPM drives. Only Seagate’s Barracuda 7200.11 is actually close to it. Hitachi is only able to muster a 17.1 ms access time, which disqualifies this drive for any type of server applications, so we hope that Hitachi can adjust the drive’s characteristics before thinking of an Ultrastar 7K1000.B for servers. WD does better in I/O performance as well, as you will see on the following pages.

This test is not relevant to everyday life, but it checks the drive’s maximum throughput from and into the cache memory.