Usually we use three programs to evaluate hard disk drive performance, DiskSpeed32, HD Tach and HD Tune. DiskSpeed32, however, would freeze exactly in the middle of the data gathering process and our best guess is that this program isn’t compatible with 2 TB drives. Thus unfortunately we had to keep it out of our benchmarking process.

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

On the burst transfer rate measured by HD Tach Western Digital Caviar Green 2 TB was 6% faster than Seagate Barracuda LP 2 TB. Keep in mind that the burst transfer rate measures the maximum transfer rate between the motherboard SATA port and the hard disk drive controller located on the drive itself, and may not represent real-world performance.

Average transfer is certainly the most important parameter for the regular PC user and on HD Tach Seagate Barracuda LP 2 TB was 20% faster than Western Digital Caviar Green 2 TB.