TEST BED

TESTING METHODOLOGY

     Thoroughly testing hard disk drives may require time and patience but that's just about it. Of course, that doesn't mean that one must take it lightly, at least not when people base their decision on your results. True some choose to only use 2 or 3 benchmarking suits in order to measure the performance of a drive or drives since quite honestly most benchmarking suites do tend to agree with each other (so it's not really wrong) but I've always liked taking things a step further in order to be almost 100% certain of the results I get and post in the charts.

     So, in this kind of reviews I'll be using a total of 7 different benchmarking suites in an effort to bring you the most accurate results across the board. Now the only reason why i say effort is because real-world usage is not always on par with what results one gets by running several benchmarks on a drive and that's mainly because there are many variables at work from ambient temperatures to hardware configurations and even firmware versions. The benchmarking applications use are AIDA64 suite (former Everest Pro), HD Tune Professional (as of October 2016 seek times of 3.5” drives are also recorded), HD Tach RW, ATTO*, Sisoftware Sandra Titanium, Crystal Disk Mark 64bit* and the PCMARK 7** (secondary storage suite). These benchmarking tools are the best in what they do and as you will also see later on their results more or less agree. Each test is performed a total of 6 times and then the average is recorded into the charts. Temperatures are recorded using Hard Disk Sentinel and after 45 minutes of continuous testing in a 23 degrees Celsius temperature controlled room. Finally, I also make use of the ExTech HD600 dBA meter on each of the drives (2-5cm away) in order to accurately record their noise levels (during access), although if you don't turn off all system fans when doing so it's quite possible that you will never even hear the drive. The operating system used is a fresh installation of Microsoft Windows 10 Pro with every update installed up until the time of testing.

* As of August 2025, I'll be introducing extra tests with ATTO v5.00.2 and Crystal Disk Mark v9.0.1.
** Support for PCMARK 7 has been discontinued since 2020 but it's still valid for SATA & SAS drives.