Linear Read Graphs

I’ll start the today’s session in WinBench in a slightly uncommon way. Each drive of the SpinPoint P80 series is a unique product – the factory formatting assigned an individual zone map to each of them – so I offer you typical read graphs with my comments.

SP0612N

You can clearly see two surfaces in this graph, each of which has its own zone configuration. The average speed conforms to the overall data density, 60GB per platter.

The first sample of the SP1203N model produced the following graph:

SP1203N

The read speed is just slightly higher than that of the SP0612N and I’m about sure that this sample uses four surfaces, rather than three. Since the sector density has grown, it took fewer tracks to amass the desired storage capacity – you can see this by comparing the read speeds at the beginning and end for this and the previous models.

SP1213C

This sample obviously uses higher-capacity platters – its read speed is about 10MB/s higher than of the previous sample and we can discern three platters of a varying density.

SP1604N

Lastly, there’s a sample, whose all surfaces have a similar zone distribution. Without the characteristic “jaggedness” of the graph, it would be an ordinary last-gen hard disk on 80GB platters.

Note that the graphs serve only illustrative purposes and you shouldn’t associate the SP1203N model, for example, with reduced density. Most drives really have 80GB platters, but sometimes you can come across a slower sample. In 160GBmodels, however, you are sure to meet no low-density platters at all.

To end this section of the review, I offer you a table with estimated platter capacities for each of our samples of the SpinPoint P80:

Thus, only three out of thirteen drives have small platters, and both SP0612N samples are among them.