Round-Up: Comparison Testing of 22 Hard Disk Drives

Yippee, it’s the hard drive round-up, folks! Today, Tom’s Hardware takes 22 hard drives through their paces and then reports the findings directly to you, the reader.

The jockeying for position among hard drive makers never seems to end, particularly in the areas of drive capacity and speed. As a result, hard disks have nearly doubled their capabilities over the last few years, in contrast to the performance of CPUs and systems as a whole. But that’s no mere anomaly; we expect further improvements and enhancements in the immediate future.

This market is dominated by a handful of vendors that together offer the majority of 3.5″ drives for desktop computers: Hitachi, Maxtor, Samsung, Seagate and Western Digital. Vendors such as ExcelStor also play a supporting role in this market, but their products are based on technology that originates with Hitachi. [Read the rest]