Fast, affordable and ample desktop storage

"I need more space on my hard-disk." How many times have you said this to yourself? It's true no amount of storage is "enough" and if you bought yourself a 160GB hard drive six months ago, chances are you are eyeing a 320GB drive now (especially with the fall in costs). We compare three 320GB SATA II desktop drives to help you decide on your next upgrade. The drives come with the latest features like PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording), NCQ support and 3Gbps support.

Complete Picture of Performance

We ran these drives through a combination of synthetic and real-world tests to get a complete picture of performance as seen in a desktop environment. We used HD Tune's random read and write tests. These gauge speeds seen throughout a drive's surface, including the time taken to access given data. We also ran Everest Ultimate's linear read, linear write and read test suite modules.

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"I need more space on my hard-disk." How many times have you said this to yourself? It's true no amount of storage is "enough" and if you bought yourself a 160GB hard drive six months ago, chances are you are eyeing a 320GB drive now (especially with the fall in costs). We compare three 320GB SATA II desktop drives to help you decide on your next upgrade. The drives come with the latest features like PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording), NCQ support and 3Gbps support.

Complete Picture of Performance

We ran these drives through a combination of synthetic and real-world tests to get a complete picture of performance as seen in a desktop environment. We used HD Tune's random read and write tests. These gauge speeds seen throughout a drive's surface, including the time taken to access given data. We also ran Everest Ultimate's linear read, linear write and read test suite modules.

These are low-level tests and indicate the drive's performance while carrying out a single read or write operation. Managing multiple read-write tasks simultaneously gets much harder for the drives. This is an indicator of real-world performance where a drive might read OS files, write to its pagefile, and load applications, simultaneously. For this test, we created batch files to automate file transfer from one partition of the test drive to another, along with two other similar operations running alongside.

The ambient thermal behavior was measured with a Fluke multi-meter and noise levels were also considered. None of the drives were audible once inside the case and hence we didn't use this as a factor in the comparison test.

WD Caviar SE16 3200AAKS-00B3A0:

Speed is impressive on this particular variant of WD's performance-oriented hard disks. Being a single-platter drive with one of the highest data densities on the market, shows in the numbers it puts up. The 16 MB cache helps too. In Everest Ultimate's disk benchmarking tool, the WD hit an average of 86.3 MBps in the random write test, which was the fastest in this comparison. Random read averaged at 86.6 MBps, which is again very fast for this class of hard drives.

Just about every test showed up this drive in favorable light, including PC Mark, WinRAR, and linear read and write operations. In our real world simultaneous multiple file read-write test, the WD took 988 seconds for the task. After two hours of stress testing, the WD was still not too hot to the touch, and actually produced the least temperatures measured in this comparison -- helped along by the single-platter design, no doubt. A hard drive that runs cooler, usually allows you to maintain lower overall temperatures inside your computer cabinet. The one and only place where this drive falls behind, is the average read access times, where its 16.39 ms score is slightly less than that of the Seagate entry. If you go out to buy this drive, do make sure to look for the specific model variant on the label (00B3A0).

Seagate Barracuda ST3320620AS:

The Seagate relishes real world usage. It was the fastest on our simultaneous readwrite file copy test taking just 815 seconds, which gave an idea of performance during multi-tasking. The averaged read access time of 13.35 ms, was very good as well. This drive was no push over in synthetic tests either. The averaged random write speed of 63.6 MBps, and random read speed of 63.6 MBps obtained through Everest, fared well in comparison to the Hitachi.

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