Unsung Heroes: 14 Years of Hard Drive Performance

When the likes of WD or Seagate launch a new hard drive, the product is hailed as a more efficient means of storing data. Useful? Very. High class or sexy? Not so much. You've got to admit that hard drives have gotten a bum rap. Granted, they're still the slowest part of the system, but HDD manufacturers deserve a bit more credit than they typically get.

We decided to take a look at how standard, spinning hard drive performance has evolved over the past 14 years. We rounded up a representative group of hard drives, formatted them, scanned them for bad sectors, and ran a few modern benchmarks to see how much performance has improved. Check it out at HotHardware.