Wandering Thoughts: Disk Read Performance Comparison with hdparm

I currently did read performance test on all of hard disks using hdparm. Simple hdparm -t did the trick.
As expected the latest 500GB SATA2 disk from Samsung outperformed all but it also died very recently after just 1 year of service.

I found it very surprising that my current laptop (Dell Vostro 1400) hard disk is slower than my 5 year old 80GB disk on desktop. That laptop is just a year old and has a Fujitsu 250GB SATA1 disk. On the contrary, the desktop disk is 5 years old and its a Maxtor 80GB SATA1 disk. Seems the higher rotational speed in the Maxtor drive made the difference.

Also, the 120GB SATA2 disk from Samsung is not that fast from the 80GB SATA1 disk !!!
Though I rely more on Hitachi or Maxtor (now Seagate) in terms of reliability than Samsung but in the Bangladeshi computer hardware market you don't always get what you want. You get only what is available at market at that moment. But that's another story.

Here is the performance graph and accompanied result data.

Disc Model	Performance (MB/sec)	Speed (rpm)	Buffer Size
FUJITSU MHY2250BH	53.50	5400	8 MB
Maxtor 6Y080M0	55.92	7200	8 MB
SAMSUNG HD120IJ	60.44	7200	8 MB
Hitachi HDT725032VLA360	73.15	7200	16 MB
SAMSUNG HD321KJ	76.83	7200	16 MB
SAMSUNG HD501LJ	79.82	7200	16 MB