HD Tach 3.0.4.0	Source: TCD Labs Inc.

HD Tach is a physical performance hard drive test for Windows 95/98/ME and Windows NT/2000/Vista/7. In Windows 9X/ME it uses a special kernel mode VXD to get maximum accuracy by bypassing the file system. A similar mechanism is used in Windows NT/2000/XP. HD Tach reads from areas all over the hard drive and reports an average speed. It also logs the read speeds to a text file that you can load into a spreadsheet and graph to visually read the results of the test. Higher bandwidth (MB/s) and lower latencies (ms) are better.

HD Tach 3.0.4 - 8MB Tests - READ Burst Speed: (Mb/s) Points Ranking Western Digital 1TB WD1001FALS HDD 214.7 Western Digital 1TB WD1001FALS HDD (RAID 0) 277.8 Western Digital 1TB WD1001FALS HDD (RAID 1) 188.8 OCZ Vertex 2 128GB SSD 266.6 Plextor PX-128M1S SSD 143.4 Seagate 2TB Barracuda XT HDD 115.8 Seagate 500GB Momentus XT SSHD 231.7 Average Read: (MB/s) Points Ranking Western Digital 1TB WD1001FALS HDD 90.5 Western Digital 1TB WD1001FALS HDD (RAID 0) 150.8 Western Digital 1TB WD1001FALS HDD (RAID 1) 90.7 OCZ Vertex 2 128GB SSD 243.7 Plextor PX-128M1S SSD 103.4 Seagate 2TB Barracuda XT HDD 64.5 Seagate 500GB Momentus XT SSHD 89.4 Random Access Time: (ms) Points Ranking Western Digital 1TB WD1001FALS HDD 12.1 Western Digital 1TB WD1001FALS HDD (RAID 0) 12 Western Digital 1TB WD1001FALS HDD (RAID 1) 10.1 OCZ Vertex 2 128GB SSD 0.1 Plextor PX-128M1S SSD 0.3 Seagate 2TB Barracuda XT HDD 7.9 Seagate 500GB Momentus XT SSHD 17

HDTach tests burst speed, a measure of how fast the system can transfer information from the hard disk to RAM. Thanks to its 4GB of Adaptive Memory, the 500GB Seagate Momentus XT drive nets a quick result of 231.7 MB/s! When it comes to Average Read rates the Momentus XT achieves much more pedestrian 89.4MB/s. Random access time is 17ms.