Using HDTune and HDTach, the HDD is tested for it's speed to see if it can attain a high sustained speed and the maximum burst speed. Here are the benchmark results.

With HD Tune 2.55, we can see that the HDD takes a minimum of 65.1MB/s and a maximum of 127MB/s. The average is around 100MB/s. The burst rate is 140.7MB/s and access time is 13.8ms.

In HD Tach the result is almost identical. The burst speed is amazingly high at 326MB/s. Random access is 13.5ms, CPU utilisation is 2%. The average read is 106.9MB/s.

Although the burst speed is high, the average read is still some distance from the 138MB/s as claimed. This could be due to a lot of factors including firmware or other related issues. In fact, some of the current SATA2 HDD can already achieve 100MB/s in read.

No matter what, it is a great idea to have a faster interface for faster data throughput. Will we need it is still questionable when we can't even saturate a SATA II right now. Even Seagate says that by 2011, it expects that SATA 3.0 motherboards will be ubiquitous and that applications will require the drive's 6Gbit/sec bandwidth.

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