Hitachi vs. Western Digital vs. Seagate: A Battle of the Mammoths
by Purav Sanghani on December 2, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Final Words
What we've learned is that even though two of the three drives that we reviewed today have 3.0 Gb/sec SATA interfaces, the 1.5Gb/sec drive topped both of them in most of the benchmarks. We had to run a few of our benchmarks multiple times just to prove to ourselves that the numbers were correct and nothing was interfering with the accuracy of our results.
Beginning with the IPEAK runs, the WD4000YR took the lead performing 769 IO operations per second under the Business Winstone 2004 test and 505 IO operations per second in the Content Creation Winstone 2004 part of the test. Seagate's 500GB 7200.9 came nowhere close to these numbers, but rather took a few steps back.
The WD4000YR also performed the best out of the three in the application load time tests with applications starting at around half a second faster consistently, which is a big deal. With this test, we were not only testing the specified application load times, but also general access times and service times.
All of the physical specifications of the WD4000YR tell us that it won't perform as well as the two 500GB models, but our benchmark results say otherwise. Those of us who are familiar with hard drive technology know that the higher transfer rates that the 3.0Gb/sec models have to offer can only be achieved when multiple disks are striped, but we never thought that a 1.5Gb/sec unit could out-do those with double the theoretical transfer rates.
Currently, the WD4000YR is going for as low as $213 at certain online retailers while the Seagate 500GB 7200.9 and Hitachi 7K500 are going for $350-$400. If you're not looking for a future-proof product and want quick performance for a low price, the WD4000YR is the way to go. The performance of the 7200.9 is just not up to par to recommend at the moment. It may quite possibly give much better performance in a RAID array, but that we'll leave for another day.
What we've learned is that even though two of the three drives that we reviewed today have 3.0 Gb/sec SATA interfaces, the 1.5Gb/sec drive topped both of them in most of the benchmarks. We had to run a few of our benchmarks multiple times just to prove to ourselves that the numbers were correct and nothing was interfering with the accuracy of our results.
Beginning with the IPEAK runs, the WD4000YR took the lead performing 769 IO operations per second under the Business Winstone 2004 test and 505 IO operations per second in the Content Creation Winstone 2004 part of the test. Seagate's 500GB 7200.9 came nowhere close to these numbers, but rather took a few steps back.
The WD4000YR also performed the best out of the three in the application load time tests with applications starting at around half a second faster consistently, which is a big deal. With this test, we were not only testing the specified application load times, but also general access times and service times.
All of the physical specifications of the WD4000YR tell us that it won't perform as well as the two 500GB models, but our benchmark results say otherwise. Those of us who are familiar with hard drive technology know that the higher transfer rates that the 3.0Gb/sec models have to offer can only be achieved when multiple disks are striped, but we never thought that a 1.5Gb/sec unit could out-do those with double the theoretical transfer rates.
Currently, the WD4000YR is going for as low as $213 at certain online retailers while the Seagate 500GB 7200.9 and Hitachi 7K500 are going for $350-$400. If you're not looking for a future-proof product and want quick performance for a low price, the WD4000YR is the way to go. The performance of the 7200.9 is just not up to par to recommend at the moment. It may quite possibly give much better performance in a RAID array, but that we'll leave for another day.
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Visual - Saturday, December 3, 2005 - link
i cant imagine what error would hang my drive for 8 seconds :/ and if it really happened, even in recoverable error, i'd not trust that drive again anyway. so it'd be better to mark it "failed"Lakeshow - Saturday, December 3, 2005 - link
Yeah I read that article on storagereview.com couple days after I got my WD4000YR and it kind of bothers me.Oh well, what are you gonna do? I absolutely love this drive. I can only hope this drive will live until my next voluntary upgrade.
Lifted - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
The HD Tach screenshots say "for non-commercial or evaluation use only, see license agreement."Hmmmmm. Anandtech is non-commercial?
Gannon - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
I'd like to see more tests done on drives that are at least 80% full because a lot of us pack our drives full of stuff and the performance we end up getting is when we've filled it. While these tests are good and all, I think they inflate the actual scores of how a drive is really used. No drive sits with just XP and a game or two and a couple of test files, that bias's the tests toward unrealistic use of how hard disks are used, especially big ones over 160GB. I fill my drives regularly and I have over 800GB needless to say I'm backing up stuff to DVD's just to have enough space to perform other operations.WileCoyote - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
Why does everyone want Anandtech to benchmark their current system? Run your own benchmark if you want to know the speed of your hard-drive/computer. I think the articles here are perfect - they help me decide what to purchase in the future. I don't need an article to make me feel good about what I already have. I like the current format of articles that educate me on my next purchase.johnsonx - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
time to cut down on the pron addictionOlaf van der Spek - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
> We were also surprised to see the WD4000YR perform so well, since it is using the 1 st generation 1.5Gb/sec interface.That's a joke, right?
I hope you weren't really expecting a significant performance improvement from a faster interface (300 mbyte/s instead of 150 mbyte/s while HDD's are more near 75 mbyte/s and only during seqential access).
bob661 - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
I think the interface increases benefit RAID performance more than singledrive performance.Olaf van der Spek - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
I don't think so, as (without involvement of port multipliers) SATA is a point to point architecture.yacoub - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
Or you can go buy a pair of 200GB Samsung SpinPoint SP2004C drives for under $100 each and have a much quieter drive setup. :)