Western Digital 45 GByte Hard Drive

Performance: Data Transfer Speed

Here you can see how the WD drives compares to the candidates of our last review. The red lines represent the maximum transfer speed (outer medium), while the blue ones show the minimum transfer speed (end of medium). At first, the score of 25.4 MBytes/s seemed to be quite high for a 5400 RPM drive, if you look at the two other WD drives working at 7,200 rpm. However, this phenomenon can easily be explained: Thanks to the high data density, more bits can be read in one pass, which compensates the slower rotation speeds.

You can also see that the transfer speeds are clearly less than the bandwidth of UltraDMA/66 (66 MBytes/s), which is a common appearance. Only the drives' cache memory is able to provide those high transfer rates today.

For future tests I will use HD Tach 2.61 instead of ZD's WinBench (see graph) because it provides the same result in much shorter time. Additionally it also tests the write performance.