X-bit labs

HDTach 2.7: New Essence or New Exterior?

Category: Storage

by Nikita Nikolaichev

[ 01/28/2004 | 11:46 PM ]

This short article is devoted to a new version of a well-known utility for HDDs benchmarking: HDTach 2.7, which has been recently released. Have all the bugs we discovered in the previous version of the test been eliminated? Find out if the new HDTach is accurate enough to be used for testing purposes!

Table of contents:

• Closer Look at HDTach 2.7
  
• Conclusion
  

Despite the fact that I decided to remove HDTach benchmark from the list of tests used for hard disk drives (see the details that led to this decision in the following articles: WD Raptor: First ATA Hard Disk Drive with 10,000rpm Speed and Seagate Barracuda Serial ATA V Hard Disk Drive Review), we will still need to deal with this test once again. So, today we are going to return to discussing whether HDTach is suitable for HDD testing or not.

One day all over the Web there appeared announcements about a new HDTach 2.7. It was curious that the new test version was released by a well-known Simpli Software Inc., and not by TCDLabs, which has always been known as the developer of HDTach test. The tcdlabs.com domain name now leads to simplisoftware.com, so I dare suppose that there is some relationship between TCDLabs and Simpli Software Companies. Unfortunately, simplisoftware.com site doesn’t offer any explanations to this news.

However, there is the new curious program: HDTach 2.7!

Closer Look at HDTach 2.7

Right under the huge button saying: “Download Me” we can find a brief description of this test:

"HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives (ZIP/JAZZ), flash devices, and RAID arrays. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers of software as possible and get as close to the physical performance of the device possible.

Wow, this is a truly universal benchmark, it is even suitable for RAID arrays!

Ok, I will not keep you waiting for long, here is a screenshot of the working window:

HDTach 2.7

Click to enlarge

Hm, it looks just like the good old HDTach 2.61, doesn’t it?

HDTach 2.61

Click to enlarge

Well, I should say that the top picture looks nicer to me. But when I tell you that it took the new HDTach version about 20 seconds to work through a 74GB hard disk drive, you will probably agree that the upper screenshot of the HDTach 2.7 deserves a closer look.

If I am not mistaken the new program version performed much fewer iterations during the read and write speed measurements than the previous version 2.61.