Many people have asked me what hard drive they should buy; they want to know which ones are the fastest and the most reliable. Both are good questions, but the answers are not so simple. To make matters more complicated, Serial ATA drives are coming in the near future and claim to provide better performance than the IDE Parallel ATA drives that we all currently use.

There are basically four manufacturers to consider when buying IDE drives: Maxtor, Western Digital, Seagate, and IBM. Over the years all of these manufacturers have had their ups and downs, meaning that they've all had their bad production runs -- that's nothing new in the electronics industry though. Everyone goes through that and as consumers we just have to deal with it.

Unfortunately IBM's bad luck has carried on for a bit longer than usual; I can't recommend their Deskstar (or as some say, "Deathstar") hard drives under any circumstances at this time. I've seen too many of them fail miserably over the past year to comfortably say that they are worth buying. Recently the IBM drive division was sold off to Hitachi, so perhaps things will improve for them in the future.

Western Digital's Caviar Special Edition, or what's sometimes called the JB series, are good quality drives but I wouldn't trust any of their other offerings. Same with Maxtor: anything below 30GB is not worth your consideration. In fact I would suggest staying away from any 5400RPM drive by any manufacturer; as a rule they tend to be of a lower quality of manufacture. As far as warranty is concerned, all IDE drives carry a one-year warranty except Western Digital whose Caviar Special Edition drives have a three-year warranty. Despite the shorter warranty, Maxtor drives have a comparable failure rate to Western Digital.

So now we know where drives stand as far as quality is concerned... but what about performance? Is one brand faster than the other? What does that mean in the world of everyday computing? How can we know if SATA drives are faster if we don't even know where current ATA IDE drives stand?

Drive performance evaluation

Here are the drives that were available to me for testing:

The system I used for testing was an Iwill P4HT motherboard, Pentium4 2.4B processor, two sticks of 256MB Apacer PC2700 CL2.5, an MSI TI4200 video card, an Antec TruePower 330 power supply and Windows XP Professional. For RAID testing I used an MSI 845PE Max2-FIR motherboard instead of the Iwill and for the SCSI drive I used an Adaptec 29160 Ultra160 PCI card. Each tested IDE drive was put on its own ATA133 channel on the Iwill board using an 80-wire IDE cable. The SCSI drive I threw in there just to show what the real difference between an ATA and a SCSI drive is.

My testing procedure was as follows: I used a spare 40GB Maxtor drive to install Windows on and I connected the other drives to the ATA133 and ATA100 connectors one at a time to test them. For the Maxtor drives I tested them on both channels to show the difference between the ATA133 and ATA100 protocols.

For gaming tests I used the built-in benchmarks in Quake3 Arena and Unreal Tournament 2003 using version 1.4 of the HardOCP benchmarking program. All of the programs were installed to the tested hard drive and run from that location. Here's what I found: The game benchmarks showed such a tiny difference between the best performer and the worst performer that they aren't worth publishing -- even the RAID arrays were within a few insignificant frames per second of the other drives. My conclusion is that no matter what hard drive or drives you use, your gaming performance will be the same. The only thing that will be altered is the time that it takes to load each level from the hard drive. For the record: a fast hard drive will not give you more frames per second in Q3 or UT2003 or any other 3D game. The exception to that may be if you have a very small amount of RAM and the game needs to use swapfile space in order to run -- in that case you may see better framereates from a faster drive.

I also used SiSoft Sandra 2003 to measure the file system's transfer rate. I ran the test three times for each drive to make sure that there were no fluke results, and I recorded the third score only after verifying that it was consistent with the previous two tests (it always was). It's important to note that the same drivers were used for the drive controllers for each drive. An updated controller driver will likely produce better results than these, but the purpose of this article is not to show how fast I can make the drives go; this article's purpose is to compare drive speed and efficiency on a common platform. With that in mind, here's how the drives performed on my test system from fastest to slowest:

We can assume that the Seagate Cheetah would dominate the charts in RAID-0, followed by the Maxtor 80GB DiamondMax Plus 9 in RAID-0 had I two drives to test with. Likewise a four-drive array would provide even better performance, but such a controller and four identical hard drives were also not available to me for testing -- besides that, such equipment is rarely purchased and used for desktop use. The Cheetah drive is actually an Ultra320, but I didn't have a U320 controller so it is only performing at U160 speeds in these tests.

Atto is a widely recognized hard drive benchmarking utility and it tests the full range of a hard drive's data transfer abilities. The scale changes according to the length of the bar graph, so take care not to confuse scales when comparing results. The left column indicates the size of the file that was transferred, which is doubled as the graph descends. I ran the tests three times to ensure that the results were consistent. Once again they are rated from fastest to slowest, although I didn't set up the WD array again because all of the other results were consistent with the findings from the Sandra tests:

Maxtor 40GB ATA133 in RAID-0 array

Seagate Cheetah on SCSI U160 controller

Maxtor 80GB on ATA133 controller

Maxtor 80GB on ATA100 controller

Maxtor 40GB on ATA133 controller

Western Digital 80GB on ATA133 controller

Seagate 60GB on ATA133 controller

As you can see there is a measurable difference between the three brands. But how does that difference show up in real-world scenarios? Every time your hard drive is running the faster drive will get done faster, obviously. But your hard drive is rarely stressed for any length of time, and the differences in the single IDE drives is not significant enough to produce a noticable difference in performance unless you are working with extremely large files. In that case you would definitely want to go with a RAID-0 array and you'd want the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 with the 8MB buffer using an ATA133 controller. If your budget is not quite as limited, any SCSI U320 drives in an array on a U320 RAID controller will give optimal performance. Once again I'll point out that there was no noticable difference in gaming performance or in everyday computing use between ANY of these drives -- so drive performance doesn't really matter all that much to the average user. One thing I did notice is that the 8MB cache didn't seem to offer a great advantage, although as you can see above the advantage is indeed measurable.

Other factors that you may want to consider: the Maxtor drives were noticably quieter than the Seagate and WD drives, the SCSI drive being the loudest by far. The Maxtor low-profile 40GB drive ran the hottest out of all of the drives I tested, although that shouldn't be a problem for most users who are on a single hard drive system. If you have more than one hard drive I would recommend mounting a fan in front of your drive cage to keep them operating within their specified parameters.

As far as value is concerned, the best value is a toss-up between WD and Maxtor. The WD offers a longer warranty but it is not as fast. The Maxtor costs a few dollars more but has a shorter warranty and it has top performance. The Seagate IDE drives have the least value, being about as expensive as WD but lacking the performance and the warranty.

Between WD and Maxtor I can't tell you which one to buy; that's up to you. I've used both drives in my personal system and I've always been satisfied with their quality and the service I got from the manufacturers. Don't let the shorter warranty scare you -- Maxtor makes excellent drives. But if the tiny difference in speed isn't important to you and you're trying to save some money, look for a 40 or 60GB Seagate. In the end you're unlikely to regret whatever decision you make.

Discuss this article or get technical support on our forum.

Copyright 2003 Jem Matzan. Verbatim copying and redistribution of this entire article are permitted without royalty in any medium provided this notice is preserved.