HDTach 3

HDTach provides another look into the transfer rates of a disk drive similar to WinBench 99’s transfer rate test. We perform 3 runs of HDTach to see if there is any variance in the results. For the 120GB Seagate unit, we received the same results.


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From the graph, we see that “Sequential Read Speed” averages at about 27.2MB/sec with a “Burst Speed” of 27.7MB/sec. The sequential read speed is slightly higher here compared to WinBench 99’s Transfer Rate results, but that is due to the difference in read methods by each software.

WinBench 99 Real World Tests – File System Performance
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  • foot167 - Thursday, September 29, 2005 - link

    I just returned the 300GB model today after 3 weeks of use. Everything I read about them said they were terrible but I had to give them a shot anyway. Sometimes my computer wouldn't recognize the drive. it would say no drive there. then on monday the drive decided that it was unformatted and needed to be reformatted. good thing that i kept a copy of everything i put on the external on my internal drives.

    the 300gb one can be had for under $200 and even less after rebates.

    How about some reliability tests on these drives. Does the firewire/usb interface affect the reliability of these drives? Are they prone to crashing for some reason?
  • ScottyDog - Friday, September 30, 2005 - link

    I agree with your comments about reliability with these external drives. I have one and have the same problems with the disk suddenly becoming "unformatted". I have done a google search and this is a huge problem with these external USB or Firewire chipsets whether they are are the Oxford or Prolific flavors.

    Somebody really needs to do an article about what is going on here as I have resorted to leaving my drive off unless I am doing a backup and then need to restore otherwise all my data gets destroyed.

    I originally thought it might be due to write caching and changing it to safe mode but it makes no difference with mine. If I leave it on eventually it becomes "Unformatted".

    type this into google and you will see this is a wide spread problem with these external drives: windows delayed write failure
  • Googer - Thursday, September 29, 2005 - link

    Dosen't it have 1394? I won't buy an External HDD with out 1394a and/or 1394b.
  • MASCARNHAS - Monday, June 21, 2010 - link

    I've used Report and although its great, I've had better luck with WheresTheFreeSpace. It is Modeled after a PC application that is very popular called <a href="http://www.wheresthefreespace.com">Treesiz... (but its for Mac).</a>

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