We ran the tests five times and averaged the results.
Next we took a look at Blackmagic Design’s Disk Speed Test, a tool released last year on the Mac App Store that, as of the most recent release, measures incompressible data for fairly accurate sequential benchmarking. Both drives reported similar speeds on their corresponding read/write tests, with an average speed of 188.45 MB/s read and 154.75 MB/s write. The results were great for a single mechanical drive. We performed a Read/Write test of 2GB on a theoretical 1280x720 8-bit video file. The results demonstrate tremendous performance from a single mechanical drive and offer an enormous amount of storage space although, as we’ll show later on, the performance of a SSD still holds a significant advantage.įirst up: AJA System Test, which is used in video production to ensure that drives are fast enough to support certain video formats. Using the Promise Pegasus R6 Thunderbolt enclosure, which is intended to be used as a RAID array but can also be used as a Thunderbolt pass thru to a single drive, we ran several benchmarks on the drives. The drives, model ST3000DM001, set records for their platter density and eschewed the market, which was moving towards lower speed “green” drives, by instead choosing to focus on higher performance 7200RPM options.
With the introduction of Thunderbolt, however, any Thunderbolt-equipped Mac owner now has access to a virtually unlimited number of options when it comes to external storage and these same Mac owners can take advantage of the larger capacity and higher performance 3.5” hard drives that had heretofore been the exclusive purview of Mac Pro owners (and a small number of iMac owners brave enough to perform surgery on their all-in-one patients).Īmid the tragic Thailand flooding and the resulting hard drive shortage, we were able to get a look at a pair of Seagate Barracuda 3TB hard drives, released late last year. Even those systems that have relatively accessible hard drives are limited to 2.5” drives. As Macs have shifted in recent years to closed-systems without easy access to internal component upgrades, the majority of Mac owners have lost interest in items like desktop hard drive upgrades.