Three 7200 RPM Notebook Hard Drives For 2011

Benchmark Results: Throughput And Interface

Throughput is considered a key performance index for a hard drive, and in fact it is. Samsung and Seagate dominate the results, but WD’s Scorpio Black is not so far behind. Knowing that I/O and application performance are superior on the WD drive, it is hard to make a recommendation based on this metric alone.

The streaming test with Iometer confirms the results, but puts Samsung on top this time.

The interface bandwidth test tells us the peak throughput of the drive when it comes to copying data out of or into the integrated 16 MB cache memory. It is not a suitable indicator for real-life performance, though.