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 RE4, Caviar Black and Caviar Green achieved the same performance level, being, on average, 8% faster than Seagate Barracuda LP.

Average transfer is certainly the most important parameter for the regular PC user and on HD Tach the new Western Digital RE4 and Caviar Black achieved the same performance level, being, on average, 18% faster than Seagate Barracuda LP and 42% faster than Caviar Green. Here we can clearly see the huge impact of the rotational disk speed on the drive’s performance.