We tested the drive out with Sisoft Sandra 2001 to gauge its real world performance. None of the results were incredibly surprising as you might guess, but the drive performed near-spec in just about every category as we were testing it out on a motherboard supporting ATA66 only. The reason for this is that we are looking at the effects of adding a drive such as this to an older machine. Older machines may not all have support for ATA100, but can still benefit from a drive operating at 7200RPM.

Tests	Rating
Sandra Drive Index:	18722
Buffered Read:	30 MB/s
Sequential Read:	30 MB/s
Random Read:	7 MB/s
Buffered Write:	20 MB/s
Sequential Write:	13 Mb/s
Random Write:	5 MB/s
Avg Access Time:	7 ms
Min. Disk Cache:	2 MB

All in all this drive offers some fairly standard performance on our test machine. Compared to an older 4GB or 10GB drives operating at 5400RPM, the increase in drive performance over the latter seems to have a notable effect on overall system speed. If you have an older computer which has seen and upgrade or two in the processor department, it may be time to upgrade the hard drive as well.

While older boards will not generally support ATA100, most will at least offer ATA66 support. To fully take advantage of the speed of this drive, ATA100 is recommended of course.

Lastly, choosing a retail package can be a good alternative to the OEM drives many of us are accustomed to getting when we need a new drive. Retail drives have full manufacture support, come with useful applications like MaxBlast and have all the necessary cables and 5.25" drive bay brackets you'll need.

If you are comfortable with just the store warranty on your drive, it is naturally cheaper to get the OEM drive. Knowing where to get the software online can help make the installation easier, and motherboards typically come with the necessary cables anyway. Whatever the choice, now is a good time to upgrade hard drives. The prices are very reasonable, and the performance increase on even an older machine is a worthy bonus to the increase in storage.