Test System

     For this review I'll be using ABIT's AA8 DuraMAX motherboard which is based on Intel's 925X Express chipset. No, this motherboard is not blessed with a 3gb SATA interface card, but according to the team over at Seagate, it will have no bearing on my test results at all, even with 2 drives in RAID 0. However, burst rates may be lower.

Testing

     Without delay, let's get right into the testing. For benchmarking hard drives I pretty much stick with Hard Drive Tach religiously. The reason for this is because the tool is free, it doesn't lock up my computer, and it's extremely accurate. SiSoft Sandra works okay, but it tends to lock up now and then and it rarely ever produces the same results twice.

     First up, single drive performance!

     Keep in mind that Seagate rates these drives at about 60mb per/s. Our tests show that read and write speeds started out at about 60 to 65mb per/s and slowly dropped off. The average data transfer rate of the 7200.9 is about 51.1mb per/s for read speed and 50.2mb per/s write speed. As for burst rate, this system gave us a burst rate of 126.3mb per/s. I'll admit this is a little slow compared to AMD 64 systems, but this is an Intel P4 based system and should be very close to what the average P4 user should see.