Conclusion

It’s a daunting task to compare so many hard disk drives, as you can’t usually find a device that would be the best or near best in all the tests. So, we will try to name the winner in each of our benchmarks.

The drives from Hitachi looked well in IOMeter (File Server and Web Server patterns) – the drive of the older generation, the IC35L180AVV207-1, was especially good due to its small access time.

The Seagate ST3160023AS with firmware 3.05 did well in that test, too, but these high results were because of the unfortunate incident with the Promise controller (it didn’t recognize the full capacity of the drive). That’s why we exclude that drive with that firmware version from further discussion.

Thus, the drives from Hitachi will be the best choice for a server; the SATA drives from Seagate are the second best. On the contrary, the PATA drives from Seagate are most inefficient at server applications, and the Seagate ST3160023A with firmware 3.71 is the worst of them all.

Devices equipped with an 8MB cache buffer take the lead in WinBench 99. We’d like to especially mark the performance of the Maxtor drives that won High-End Disk Winmark and the WD team that showed a nice speed in Business Disk Winmark.

The Hitachi drives were only efficient on small files in the FC Test. The interface didn’t practically affect the performance there. The drives from Samsung are most stable under any load, irrespective of the file size. The Maxtors are somewhat unsure working with very small files and in the FAT32 file system.

So, among the reviewed devices, we recommend purchasing the Maxtor drives for work with streaming video/audio content, the Hitachi and Western Digital drives for work with common Windows applications. Samsung’s devices can be characterized as “universal” – they don’t seem to have any obvious weaknesses.