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

While it's got nothing on the desktop Barracuda, the Travelstar 7K100 manages to beat the Momentus 7200.1 in HD Tach's sustained transfer rate tests. Seagate's Momentus 5400.3 claims the top spot among the 5,400-RPM drives. There, the Momentus 5400.2 and Scorpio WD1200VE are closely matched, with the Travelstar 5K100 lagging a little. And then, of course, there's the MHV2040AT at close to 10 MB/s off the pace.

Burst performance is pretty consistent across the ATA drives, with the Hitachis proving a little bit faster. The big loser here is the MHV2040AT, which can't even muster a third of the ATA interface's peak throughput.

HD Tach's random access time tests favor the Momentus drives, with the Travelstars and the Scorpio about a millisecond behind at each spindle speed.

The results of our HD Tach CPU utilization tests are well within the +/- 2% margin for error in this test.