Installation

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Just like all internal hard drives, installation is trouble-free on a WinXP machine.  In our tests, it was installed as a secondary/standalone drive and all that needed to be done was to initialize and format the drive for use.

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Once you initialize the drive in Disk Management, you can then set your partitions, format and assign the desired drive letter. 

Performance

Our testing methodology consists of both synthetic benchmarks and real-life transfer rates.  Three preferred tools are used to measure such performance.  The Seagate SATA II 750GB features perpendicular recording technology and the impressively high storage capacity is achieved by offering approximately 188GB on a total of four platters.  As mentioned above, it was properly tested as a secondary drive in the test system without any partitions defined.  Before we look at all the results, let's first have a look at our test system specs...

Performance Results - SANDRA 2008

I always like to start with the popular and trusty SANDRA Suite.  The most reliable disk benchmark is their File System Bench and the only I like to use to measure hard drive performance.  The results are shown in the table below...

While SANDRA reported the lowest access time, it also reported the lowest transfer rate, especially when compared to its actual performance.  Regardless, these results are actually a bit higher than what you should expect from a 7200rpm SATA II drive that is not part of a RAID setup.

Performance Results - HD Tune

The second and only other synthetic benchmark tool I like to use is HD Tune.  After using it on countless products, I find its results to be more accurate than any other tool in its class.  Most importantly, all results are always highly consistent. 

After extensive testing of this drive, I'm confident that the maximum transfer rates you can expect from this drive under the right environment is anywhere between 75-78 MB/s.  HD Tune results were right on par with these findings.  In addition, the access time was a more credible 14ms.

Actual Performance Results

As I like to do with any storage product, I deviate from synthetic benchmarks and like to provide actual performance results so that most will have a much clearer idea at what they can actually expect in terms of overall performance. These tests are always done with the excellent DiskBench Utility. Once again, for those who are unfamiliar with this application, DiskBench is a utility designed to measure real life transfer rates. Unlike synthetic benchmark utilities, this application will allow you to create an image file of a user specified size and allow you to transfer to and from the device you are testing in order to capture real-time read/write transfer rate and time. Other than running these tests on your own, it is simply the most accurate tool to capture reliable read/write times of any storage product.

I spent the extra time thoroughly testing both read and write performance.  As with mostly all similar products I have tested here, the results were much more credible.  These results confirmed the maximum transfer rate you can expect from this drive is just above 78MB/s.  All of the results were actually quite impressive, with the exception of the read performance from smaller files.  I ran these test several times, only coming up with the same results.  However, looking at the results above, I will tell you that they are well above what you should expect from a majority of 7200rpm SATA hard drives. 

Additional Testing

This drive does run about average in terms of operating temperature.  To test its temperature, the trusty ThermoHawk Touchless Thermometer was used.  Temps were captured but after 1hr of idle operation and again with the drive under load.  The results are shown below...

As far as noise levels go, this drive does run very silent.  Not quite as silent as my Samsung SpinPoint T Series drives I have on my HTPC, but certainly much quieter than a number of Western Digital drives.

Next: Conclusions