HD Tach

The WD740GD continues to put on an impressive show in HD Tach's read speed tests, where the drive's average and minimum transfer rates lead all competitors. Maxtor's Atlas IV and Western Digital's original Raptor do spike to higher maximum read speeds, though.

Our 7,200RPM drives get a little revenge in HD Tach's write speed tests, but the WD740GD still turns in the best minimum write speed and the second fastest average write speed.

In HD Tach's random access time test, the WD740GD leads even the 10K-RPM SCSI drives, though only by fractions of a millisecond. Again, note how Western Digital has improved the WD740GD's access time, and also note how much faster both Raptors are than the 7,200-RPM Serial ATA drives.

None of our Serial ATA drives can keep up with Ultra 320 SCSI when it comes to burst speeds, but that's to be expected. The Serial ATA spec tops out at 150MB/sec, which isn't fast enough to catch our 10K RPM SCSI drives in this test. Still, the WD740GD leads all our Serial ATA drives and is quite a bit faster than the WD360GD.

The WD740GD's CPU utilization is a little higher than the competition in HD Tach, but not by enough of a margin to cause concern.