HD Tach

The 10K-RPM drives dominate HD Tach's read speed tests with the Cheetah edging out the Atlas in all but the maximum read speed test. The Raptor falls in behind the SCSI drives, beating out the rest of the Serial ATA competition and even our IDE RAID 0 configuration in the average and minimum read speed tests.

Though they dominate HD Tach's read speed tests, our 10K-RPM SCSI drives are upstaged by Seagate's Barracuda V in HD Tach's write speed tests. The SCSI drives have a much higher minimum write speed, but Seagate's Serial ATA drive has higher maximum and average write speeds.

Between the SCSI drives, the Atlas 10K IV has slightly faster average and minimum write speeds than the Cheetah 10K.6, but the latter's maximum write speed is a little better.

HD Tach's random access time tests loosely follow what we saw in Winbench 99. This time around, Seagate's Cheetah 10K.6 is just a hair quicker than Maxtor's Atlas 10K IV. Western Digital's WD360GD turns in a third-place performance that's competitive with the other 10K-RPM drives and much faster than our IDE RAID 0 array.

The 10K-RPM SCSI drives really get a chance to stretch their legs in HD Tach's read burst speed tests, where they pummel the competition, including the Raptor. The Cheetah 10K.6 manages a slightly better read burst speed than the Atlas 10K IV, but both SCSI drives are over 60MB/second faster than their nearest competition.

The Raptor barely beats out the other Serial ATA drives in HD Tach's read burst speed test, and it's a good 25MB/s slower than our IDE RAID 0 array.

In CPU utilization, our 10K-RPM drives are sandwiched between Maxtor and Seagate's Serial ATA drives and our IDE RAID 0 array. Of the 10K-RPM drives, the Cheetah manages the lowest CPU utilization, followed closely by the Atlas and the Raptor.