Testing:

HD Tach 3.0.1.0 RW (Long Benchmark):

HD Tach is dedicated to analyzing hard drive performance, and it provides a few pieces of information regarding the drive being tested. The chart below details the reported CPU usage (%), the access time (ms), the average read speed (MB/s), and the burst speed (MB/s) of the four drives being tested. Lower values are desirable for CPU usage and access time, while higher values are better for average read speed and burst speed.


What we see from the data above is that the CPU usage and access time are about par for the course, but the transfer rate values are much more interesting. While the burst speed doesn't quite reach as high as you might want for a SATA 3Gbps drive, the average read speed is definitely impressive. Of the five drives tested, the 320GB Scorpio is the best, even beating a 7200RPM 3Gbps drive from Seagate!


SiSoft Sandra XI SP1 (Physical Disks Benchmark):

The chart below summarizes the results taken from SiSoftware Sandra XI SP1's Physical Disks Benchmark. This benchmark provides two results that represent the performance of each drive, where lower values are desirable for the average access time (ms) and higher values are desirable for drive index (MB/s).


Here we see that the 320GB Scorpio is rated as the fastest seeking drive of the group by a huge margin. HD Tach listed the seek times as being much closer, but a few additional runs of Sandra confirmed the data reported. When it comes to drive index, the 320GB Scorpio edges out the 250GB Scorpio, but it can't quite compete with the 160GB Seagate Momentus 7200.2.