HD Tach provides only two results, the burst transfer rate and the average transfer rate. We ran the “long bench” test from this program.

HD Tach confirmed what we had seen with DiskSpeed32: 500 GB hard disk drives from Seagate achieved a higher burst transfer rate due to their larger buffer (32 MB). Disks from Western Digital were the ones with the lower burst rates, with disks from Samsung and Hitachi between Seagate’s and Western Digital’s.

The three drives from Seagate were, on average, 5% faster than Samsung HD502IJ, 8% faster than Western Digital RE3, 10% faster than Western Digital Caviar GP and 22% faster than Western Digital Caviar 16.

Average transfer is certainly the most important parameter for the regular PC user and on HD Tach Western Digital RE3, Seagate SV35.3 and Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 were the fastest 500 GB hard disk drives, achieving a similar average transfer rate. As mentioned before, Western Digital RE3 is targeted to the enterprise market, Seagate SV35.3 is targeted to digital surveillance systems and Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 is targeted to the mainstream market.

These three disks were, on average, 12% faster than Hitachi Deskstar P7K500, 21% faster than Samsung HD502IJ and 41% faster than Western Digital Caviar SE16. Samsung HD502IJ was 16% faster than Western Digital Caviar SE16 and 22% faster than Caviar GP.