Seagate and Western Digital 1TB Drives: Improved and Green

PCMark05

We use the HDD test suite within PCMark05 for further comparative hard disk scores as it provides a mixture of actual application results and specific read/write percentages made use of by these programs. The program utilizes the RankDisk application within the Intel iPEAK SPT suite of tools to record a trace of disk activity during usage of real world applications. We replay these traces to generate performance measurements based upon the actual disk operations within each application. The HDD test suite contains 53% read and 47% write operations with each trace section utilizing varied amounts of read or write operations.

In PCMark05, we see a substantial narrowing of the performance gap between the Seagate and the Western Digital drive, though neither device fares particularly well against the competition. The XP Startup portion of the test is particularly brutal on our 1TB drives, putting the 7200.11 behind the 7200.10 and just barely edging out the 7200.9 competition, which Seagate markets as being two generations older.

The Western Digital drive finishes at or near the bottom in every test. While this result is not surprising given WD's focus on power saving features rather than performance, it is certainly enough to give pause to the average desktop user who would consider choosing this unit for a heavy multitasking setup.