Introduction, Testing Methodology And Test Setup

As soon as I saw the announcements on Seagate's 1.5TB drive I was intrigued.  When I saw the price on Newegg (a mere $189.99) I assumed that this drive would be slow.  I'm not even sure why... I guess it just seemed like a brand new 1.5TB drive for a reasonable price would have to have some sort of catch.

So, I decided that XCPUs.com should do a review.  But, doing a review on a single hard drive would be pointless, so I had to get some contenders.  I had a limited budget, so I had to pick my hard drives carefully.  I decided on a Velociraptor 150 (since they an undeniably fast drive) and a Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB drive (since it's an industry standard 1TB drive).

Testing Methodology

All hard drives were tested on the same PC (specs are below in Test Setup section), running on the same SATA controller.  I got each hard drive new, and took great care to ensure that every step of preparation was exactly the same on each hard drive.  I even swapped SATA ports and re-tested a couple times to make sure there were no anomalies in my test setup.

To ensure the results of this review were accurate I decided to test every drive with every benchmark at least 3 times.  If the results were nearly identical, I figured 3 runs were enough and used the average score of the 3 runs.  On some tests where results varied I tested more than 3 times and took the average score of each test as the final result.

Test Setup

The test setup I used for this review is as follows:

Just for fun, I decided I should include an obligatory shot of the packaging (good job, Newegg!).

A picture of the drives hooked up in my test rig (bad cable management... it's embarrassing, but I was eager to get these drives up and running!).

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Index: Page 1 - Introduction, Testing Methodology And Test Setup Page 2 - Meet The Contenders Page 3 - HD Tune Results Page 4 - HD Tach Results Page 5 - Real-World Performance And Temps Page 6 - Final Thoughts