HD Tach
We tested HD Tach with the benchmark's full variable zone size setting.

These relatively slow average transfer rates go a long way toward explaining the DiamondMax 11's poor showing in FC-Test. The drive's lower capacity platters certainly don't help it here, although Western Digital's 500GB Caviar RE2 and SE16 manage higher sustained throughput with the same 125GB per platter.

Maxtor and Seagate are the only ones who seem to be pushing the 300MB/s Serial ATA interface. The DiamondMax 11 almost leads the field here, but it's still nearly 60MB/s shy of the interface's peak theoretical speed.

For a drive that performs so well under multitasking and multi-user loads, the DiamondMax 11's random access time is surprisingly high.

CPU utilization results are within HD Tach's +/- 2% margin of error in this test.