The Best Hard Disks

Continued from page: 1

Saturday, August 09, 2003

The Best IDEs

Hitachi Deskstar 180 gxp

Good performance and a great per GB price make this drive the winner, though by only a small margin, over its closest competitor, the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9, 200 GB SerialATA drive. The drive was third in our performance tests, behind the two Maxtor drives that showed great transfer rates and good scores in Business and Content Creation Winstone applications. Though it was behind, it was never far behind. It gave the highest transfer rates in two of the seven High-end Disk playback tests. The transfer rates for the remaining were also good. Its overall performance was only 4% lower than the best one. But it gained on the price front. Its per GB cost is even lower than the 5400 RPM drives of other manufacturers, costing only Rs 51.40/GB, making it a really hot buy. 

The Hitachi drives are actually the successors of the IBM drives. Some time back Hitachi took over the hard-drive manufacturing division of IBM. 

The Hitachi Deskstar didn’t lag in the transfer rates and was priced well

Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9

This 200 GB well-priced drive is a performance powerhouse with a PATA interface. It went almost neck-to-neck with its SATA cousin (Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 200 GB SATA) and the Seagate Barracuda SATA drive on the performance front, but won because of its aggressive pricing. 

The drive gave the highest score in the high-end Disk Winmark, which tests the drive’s transfer rates for real world applications. Going deeper into this benchmark, we noticed that the drive performed very well in the transfer tests that used Adobe Premiere, Soundforge, Photoshop, and VC++ applications. Interestingly, most of these benchmarks are of applications that use large files. So, this could mean that the drive is highly suitable if you’re using such high-end applications in your work. In addition to this, the drive gave the highest raw transfer rates. Its access time was slightly higher than the Seagate Barracuda Serial ATA drive.

Overall, a drive with good performance and pricing. Even though its Serial ATA cousin gives similar and in some cases better performance, this one is a good buy considering that parallel ATA is still more prevalent and it will be some time before it is completely replaced by SATA.

The Maxtor Diamond Max showed the best transfer rates of the lot

Seagate Barracuda ST3160021A 160 GB

Another one of our toppers, this is a money saver from Seagate. Though it gave a 14% lower score in performance compared to the topper, the Maxtor Serial ATA drive, it costs 22% lower than the same drive. 

The lower performance is possibly because of its lower cache memory buffer of 2 MB, which is 8 MB in the winners. Though the performance is lower, it’s suitable for ordinary desktop usage.

It’s a good buy for people who are not performance hungry but want large capacity at a good price. One of the hot buys in the shootout.

The Maxtor Diamond Max showed the best transfer rates of the lot

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