So I splurged recently and picked up one of the new Western Digital 300GB SATA VelociRaptor drives. I also happened to be in Las Vegas, and there was a Fry's nearby. I think that was the cause, and the effect was me ending up with the drive, but I digress. Every so often, I wonder how fast my various 5400, 7200, and 10000 RPM drives are, especially taking USB 2.0 and ESATA into account. I downloaded the latest version of HDTach and went to work with my not-very-scientific performance tests:
| Hard Drive | Random Access | CPU Utilization | Average Read | Burst Speed |
| Internal Hitachi 100GB 7200RPM | 16.8 ms | 3 % | 41.3 MB/s | 114.6 MB/s |
| External 5400RPM (USB) | 17.9 ms | 13 % | 32.8 MB/s | 36.2 MB/s |
| External 750GB 7200RPM (USB) | 13.9 ms | 0 % | 34.7 MB/s | 35.1 MB/s |
| External 750GB 7200RPM (ESATA) | 13.6 ms | 4 % | 66.9 MB/s | 90.4 MB/s |
| External 300GB 10000RPM VelociRaptor (ESATA) | 7.3 ms | 4 % | 80.0 MB/s | 88.9 MB/s |
Hardware used: Dell D820 laptop, 4gb RAM, Windows XP/SP2
BTW - the numbers in bold make me happy, and here's the graphic that went along with the final test (the VelociRaptor drive):
