Western Digital WD1200JB With 8 MB Cache: Outperforms SCSI Drives

Benchmark Results

Data Transfer Rates: Almost 50 MB/s!

In the reading process, both of the 120 GB drives from WD are just below 50 MB/s - a number that will be outperformed in a few months by the next generation of drives.

By the way, the Seagate Barracuda ATA IV still is the drive that offers the fastest minimum transfer rate: at the end of the medium, you can still read 27 MB/s or faster - while many other drives drop to ~ 20 MB/s.

In future hard drive tests, we will publish both read and write transfer rates, as the latter are quite important for applications that work with data streams (such as video or audio editing), as well as backup solutions (how fast can I copy data onto this drive?).

The 1200JB writes up to 40 MB/s - that's an excellent result. At the end of the medium, the performance of all of the drives was pretty much the same. Once again, only the Barracuda ATA IV shows that the drop in transfer performance does not have to be as big as it is sometimes.