Now we will be copying files from one partition into another.

Two disks from Maxtor did evenly well, Hitachi HDS722580VLSA80 took the third place. The Raptor drive (WD740GD) stumbled in this test – it’s not very stable working with files of different sizes.

When copying files of the ISO type, Raptor regained its leadership, ousting two Maxtors from their position. Samsung SP0802N is grasping hard at the fourth position, in spite of its small cache buffer.

The drives from Maxtor are faster than Hitachi HDS722580VLSA80 at copying average files (4MB).

Maxtor lost its positions in Programs and Windows patterns (that contain files 200KB or smaller). Hitachi HDS722580VLSA80 and Seagate ST380013AS are fast, but Raptor is the best of all. The speed of moving read/write heads around is important for copying small files.

That’s all about NTFS.

The results for the FAT32 file system don’t differ greatly from what we saw in NTFS. So there is no need in closer look at the results, just a few remarks: firstly, the speeds of the drives are slightly higher in FAT32 than in NTFS. Secondly, although the leaders remained the same, the Maxtor drives are somewhat slower in FAT32 than in NTFS and seldom take first places, allowing the Hitachi drives to come ahead. Thirdly, Raptor WD740GD, as well as the Maxtor drives, works better in NTFS.

Conclusion

The comparison of old and new hard disk drives helps us to estimate the progress in the HDD performance. It’s clear that the ex-champion, the DTLA 307075, can only compete with modern devices in applications that require small random access time.

Right now, it is difficult to name a single winner, the best HDD of our days. Western Digital Raptor WD740GD was beyond competition in synthetic patterns for Intel IOMeter, in Fileserver and Webserver, and in WinBench 99, while FC-Test was favorable to two Maxtor drives (6Y080P0 and 6Y080M0) and to Hitachi HDS722580VLSA80. I would also like to single out Samsung SP0802N as it is very fast at copying in the FAT32 file system.

P.S. Your feedback will be welcome, as always. The next roundup of the series is going to be dedicated to 120GB drives – tell us what HDD models you would like to see participating in it?