Samsung Spinpoint HD203WI 2TB HDD review - HDD Performance HD Tune PRO

HD Tune Pro

HD Tune Pro is a hard disk utility and benchmarking utility for Windows. This tiny application allows you to scan your hard drives in search for errors or take a deeper look at several performance figures coming from the storage unit.

When we grab HDTune we see a large linear test that reads/writes all over the platters from beginning to end, as such it will reflect performance really well and is a very representive test. Read perf is at best 117 MB/sec which is on par with other tests and at worst at the end of the platter we see roughly 50 MB/sec read performance with very extensive access times.

Write performance interestingly enough is better, likely thanks to the 32MB cache, at the very beginning of the test we see the 32MB cache kick in, then after it's full, performance will drop to 144 MB/sec but once we move deeper into the platter we kick back to 50 MB/sec. And the minute your drive starts to fragment and fills up, these numbers in the peak area will go down.

The latest edition of HD Tune Pro allows random access read and write testing, a feature not available to other software tools. And this is certainly interesting to observe as compared to a SSD .. this is horrible really.

Overall acceptable IOPS performance. We get 0,5 MB/sec perf returned on 4KB files. To compare, an Sandforce1200 based SSD will return 21MB/sec on 4KB files here(!).