Introduction & Specifications

The current crop of Serial ATA hard disk drives are mostly based on the latest 80GB/platter density and we thought it would be informative for most hardcore DIYers to know just how these drives perform. Although there are already 100GB/platter drives hitting the market right now, we think they won't be extremely popular at this point of time, so it would still make sense to consider drives based on a slightly older, but proven technology.

The drives chosen in this shootout represents most of the currently available SATA models here in Singapore, and possibly in other parts of the world as well. We picked the largest capacities from each model for this shootout. Although it would be ideal to fix the capacity at the same size for each model, it was increasingly difficult to specifically get manufacturers to send us their lower capacity drives, so we'd given up and decided to just stick to their flagship models and proceed from there. Thus, in order to make more sense of the results, do be mindful of the drive's maximum capacity, as well as the price. Of course, if you're in the look-out for high capacity drives, then it would be good to know what to expect between a high capacity 250GB drive as compared to the highest capacity that Samsung has to offer (which is only 160GB). In addition to that, we're comparing the best of what these manufacturers have to offer, so it also makes sense to pick the best of their offerings to compete in this shootout. Moreover, from experience, we found that performance don't vary much with different drives within the same series, so it's still reasonable to compare drives of different capacities.

The drives picked for this shootout includes :-

Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 (250GB)

Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 (200GB)

Samsung SpinPoint P80 (160GB)

Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 (160GB)

Western Digital Caviar (250GB)

The technical specifications of the drives are tabulated in the table below :-

Technical Specifications of the Hard Disk Drives in the Shootout

Drive	Hitachi Deskstar 7K250	Western Digital Caviar	Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9	Samsung SpinPoint P80	Seagate Barracuda 7200.7
Interface	Serial ATA	Serial ATA	Serial ATA	Serial ATA	Serial ATA
Capacity	250GB	250GB	200GB	160GB	160GB
Model No.	HDS722525VLSA80	WD2500JD	6Y200M0	SP1614C	ST3160023AS
Number of Disks	3	3	N/A (3?)	2	2
Number of Heads	6	6	N/A (5?)	4	4
Bytes per Sector	512	512	512	512	512
Average Read Seek	8.5ms	8.9ms	<9.3ms	8.9ms	8.5 ms
Track-to-Track Seek	1.1ms	2.0ms	N/A	0.8ms	N/A
Full Stroke Read Seek	15.1ms	21.0ms	N/A	18.0ms	N/A
Average Latency	4.17ms	4.20ms	4.20ms	4.17ms	4.16 ms
Rotational Speed	7,200RPM	7,200RPM	7,200RPM	7,200RPM	7,200 RPM
Data Transfer Rate	150MB/s (external); 757Mbits/s (internal)	1200Mbits/s (external); 748Mbits/s (internal)	150MB/s (external)	150MB/s (external); 840Mbits/s (internal)	33.3MB/sec (external); 683Mbits/s (internal)
Buffer	8MB	8MB	8MB	8MB	8MB
Power Requirements	7.6W (idle)	9.5W (idle), 12.8W (read/write)	7.3W (idle), 12.2W (seek)	7.7W (idle), 9.5W (seek)	7.5W (idle), 12.5W (seek)
Weight	640g	730g	630g	1.4 lb (635g)	635 g
SATA power	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
4-pin power	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No