This list includes two “professional” drives from Seagate and Western Digital (ST3400832NS and WD4000YR) and four ordinary “desktop” drives. To build the arrays I used four samples of the same HDD model, from the same batch and with the same firmware version.
I chose 400GB drives due to their best capacity/price ratio. If you don’t see your favorite HDD model among these, I can assure you that you’ll see it in one of our upcoming reviews. We are going to make such reviews on a regular basis.
But you may be wondering if this test is at all necessary? We have recently tested modern large-capacity HDDs on our site and know how things stand among them (for details see our article called 500GB HDD Shootout: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 and Others!). Is that not enough? It is not because I’ve got somewhat different models today and, furthermore, HDDs behave differently in a RAID array than on their own.
