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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mostlyprudent - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
AT, your multitasking conclusion is interesting. You give the nod to the WD drive because it has the smallest percentage performance drop when running the multitasking scenario. However, the Seagate drive was faster in both the Zip only test and the multitasking test. Theoretically, it slowed down more when moving to the multitasking scenario, but in reality was still faster than the WD. I understand conceptually that you're looking at the effect that multitasking has on drive performance, but I wonder if this is a relevant test when comparing drives.Anton74 - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
This may be slightly off topic, but for me personally (and I think a lot of folks), it'd be much more interesting to see reviews of drives that I might actually buy, which are at the moment 300GB or less - these larger drives are just too expensive per GB.I'd be particularly interested in the 160GB 7200.9, which to my knowledge still hasn't been tested by anyone - and it's the drive with the highest platter density at the moment, by far! But there are at least a handful reviews of the 500GB version already (which was praised with "mouthwatering benchmarks" a good month ago, but now "is just not up to par to recommend"...).
While I'm at it, how are the (mostly) slower 3Gb/s SATA drives more "future-proof"? If they're slower than the WD today despite their faster interface, they'll be slower than the WD 2 years from now, me thinks. Or are they expected to improve with age? :-P
Don't get me wrong here though, I'm glad you guys are spreading all this review goodness around (you were the first to review the Asus A8N-VM CSM for example, two thumbs up).
bob661 - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
Too expensive?! LOL! How cheap do you want them to be? Hard drives are DAMN cheap now. One of the cheapest components of the computer.LoneWolf15 - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
What he means is, that buying a 250GB drive is FAR cheaper on a cost-per-gigabyte basis. As drive size increases past a certain point in the current market, vendors charge more per GB. When you think about the fact that a Hitachi 250GB SATA2 hard disk is currently around $110, and a 500GB model is $395, why in the world would you buy the larger drive when two 250GB models cost so much less? Most of us enthusiasts have the case space, and if you really want a single large partition that badly, you can use Win2k/XP's Dynamic Drive capabilities or the JBOD feature of your RAID controller (note: I wouldn't do this personally due to data integrity issues if one drive fails, I'd just have two partitions).
He's not whinging that hard disks are expensive; just that there's no point in buying a pricey large HDD, when two medium HDD's that amount to the same size can be had for a lot less.
yacoub - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
Expect few here to understand your point. Many people here just want dick measurements of the largest, fastest pieces of hardware with as few real world constraints as possible. It makes no sense for the consumer but it makes more entertaining reading and they're here for entertainment not research purposes. :[bob661 - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
Makes perfect sense to me and, apparently, a lot of other folks here. I don't think it's out of line at all to test these drives. We ARE enthusiasts here and quite a number of us can afford enthusiast budget systems. If you want J6P reviews go over to PCWorld or something. Granted I'm not in the 7800GTX 512MB crowd (I'm a bang for the buck guy), but I DO like to see these things get reviewed. "I" like to know what's out there.Cygni - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
Anandtech can only test what the companies send them... which is why you only see reviews of high end parts or parts with special features. Makes things difficult because they could obviously make much more comprehensive and equal comparisons if they got to pick and choose... but thats life.Questar - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
No.Anandtech *chooses* to only test what companies send them. There is nothing preventing them from ording drives for testing.
PuravSanghani - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
We actually purchased the 500GB 7200.9 the week it was released so that we could benchmark these drives as quickly as possible to let our readers know how it performed before they went ahead and bought it for themselves. We thought that since it was Seagate's highest capacity drive to date and targeted towards servers it would be very informative to those who were looking for high capacity drives.This 3-way comparison was written up to show the differences between the highest capacity drives from 3 of the top hard drive manufacturers in the world to help our readers looking for high capacity models to choose the product that best fits their needs.
Regards,
Purav
Visual - Friday, December 2, 2005 - link
Nah, for products that are already available retail, it was never a problem for AT to buy their own samples. In fact, it's the preferred way, as the companies can't hand-pick better oc-ers or such. This always was one of the pluses of this site.