Testing

     I searched the internet for some good testing tools and found several.  Unfortunately, HDTach 2.70 is the only one that is a free download.  While we would like to show you every benchmark on the planet, we also want tests that you can duplicate at home without buying benchmark programs.  HDTach also seems to be the most popular hard drive benchmark, so we're all set.

 Test System

I ran the test on the drive as a single drive and as a RAID array.  Let's check out the results.

     Single drive access time 15.3ms, maximum read 66.4MB/s and average 53.5MB/s.  The Read Burst is 82.1MB/s and CPU utilization is 3.3%.

     In a RAID 0 array the performance improves just like it's supposed to.  Access time 15.6ms. maximum read is an outstanding 147.9MB/s and average is 59.9MB/s.  The CPU utilization is just 2.8%.  Now let's talk about the Read Burst Speed.  Obviously, 1428.9MB/s is way off.  We have no answer for this anomaly.  We ran the test several times and it was always about the same.  The only answer that we have is the test is not properly dumping the 2, 8MB cache buffers and is getting readings from that.  Throughout the testing done to these hard drives the temperature was constantly measured.  The temperature of the drives never exceeded 35ºC.

Conclusion

     Seagate has done a fantastic job of getting the most out of an Ultra ATA hard drive.  The speeds shown from these drives rival that of a fast SATA hard drive.  The price on these drives are outstanding as well, only $151 for a 200GB hard drive.  The performance on these drives is great.  These are the perfect drives, if you don't have SATA on your current drive.  SATA still has advantages over IDE, but these drives give you a very solid and fast option.