HDTach results

Website: HD Tach 3.0





While the read performance across both motherboards is identical with the Marvell chipset and both hard drives, the Gigabyte board clearly yields some marginal extra performance when writing, but the Asus is ahead in burst performance. The write speed on the Seagate drive is also several MB/s faster and the burst readings are a considerable 17 to 20 per cent better on SATA 6Gbps as well.

Access times are considerably lax for the Seagate 6Gbps disk though, especially considering the Western Digital is all but identical in hardware, the difference between them is SATA interface chipset and firmware. Compared to other 7,200RPM drives, it seems more the case the Seagate is slow off the mark, rather than the Western Digital Black being particularly fast. The Gigabyte board also takes a fractional latency hit with both drives too - however it's more pronounced on the Seagate again.