As the first drive to pack 20 gigs of data on a single
platter, the Deskstar 40GV's
sequential transfer rates should be top-rate. The 40GV is the first 5400
RPM drive that manages to break the 30 MB/sec barrier with its score of 30.3 MB/sec in its outer
zone. Curiously, however, its inner
track speed of 14.9 MB/sec falls short of the 15 GB/platter
Maxtor DiamondMax 60 and even the 10 GB/platter
Seagate U10.
The 40GV's access time measures out at 14.7 milliseconds... slightly better than the 15 ms one would expect from an advertised 9.5 ms seek. Nonetheless, this figure is a bit higher than leaders such as the Quantum Fireball lct10 and the Samsung Spinpoint V10200 (and even the 9.5 ms DiamondMax 60).
Let's turn to the high-level Disk WinMarks to see how these scores translate into application performance.
WinMarks...
