Our tests presented very interesting results, which however require an in-depth look. In a first analysis we can state that the three mainstream 160 GB hard disk drives included in our comparison have similar performance. If you are buying a 160 GB drive for increasing your storage space, replace a defective drive or to build a new system and you don’t see the need of more than 160 GB of storage space you can buy any of these three models that you won’t be doing a bad deal.

But from the theoretical point of view we had two surprises. First, the fact that comparing two virtually identical hard disk drives one of them (Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 160 GB) had a consistently higher burst transfer rate. This could be caused by a difference in manufacturing: it is possible that two drives from the same brand and model but from different production batches produce opposite results.

Our second surprise was the fact that even though Samsung HD-161HJ has a cache memory four times bigger than the other models (8 MB vs. 2 MB) it didn’t achieve a higher performance. In fact it was consistently slower than Seagate’s model in all burst transfer rate measurements, transfer rate that is dependent on the size and speed of the hard drive cache and also on the maximum transfer rate that the drive’s interface can provide.

Will we find these kinds of surprises on hard disk drives from higher capacities? Hold on…