Spec Summary

Here are the technical specs and firmware versions of the tested devices:

We have picked up a few opponents for them: two previous-generation 7200rpm 2.5-inch drives (with 100GB platters) and the fastest 5400rpm drive we have ever tested so far.

Interestingly, Western Digital declares the same average read seek time for the Scorpio Black as for the Scorpio Blue. Doesn’t the HDD benefit through the increased spindle rotation speed? We will check this out soon.

We also take two 3.5-inch HDDs of the same capacity from the latest generation. Thanks to the large platter size, 320 gigabytes of data fit onto one platter of a modern 3.5-inch HDD rather than on two platters as in 2.5-inch models. The average seek time parameters should be noted again: Seagate thinks it is the same for smaller and larger HDDs whereas Western Digital’s 3.5-inch model takes 2 milliseconds longer to find data.

Every HDD in this test session, save for the Western Digital Scorpio Blue, is equipped with a 16MB cache. While 5400rpm 2.5-inch drives still come with 8 megabytes of cache memory, 16 megabytes is already standard for 7200rpm 2.5-inchers, just like for 7200rpm 3.5-inch products.

Testbed and Methods

The following testing utilities were used:

• IOMeter 2003.02.15
• IOMark 0.30b14
• FC-Test 1.0
• PCMark 2004
• PCMark 2005
• PCMark Vantage

Testbed configuration:

• ASUS P5WDG2 WS Pro mainboard
• Intel Core 2 Duo E2160 processor
• IBM DTLA-307015 system disk, 15GB
• Radeon X600 graphics card
• 1GB DDR2-800 SDRAM
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP2 (and Windows Vista for PCMark Vantage)

We installed the generic OS drivers for the drives and formatted them in FAT32 and NTFS as one partition with the default cluster size. For some tests 32GB partitions were created on the drives and formatted in FAT32 and NTFS with the default cluster size, too. The drives were connected to a Promise SATA300 TX4302 controller installed into a PCI-X slot and were switched from the quiet (with Advanced Acoustic Management enabled) into the ordinary operation mode.