Surface Temperature

We monitored the surface temperature of six hard disk drives during their benchmarks. The following chart shows their operating temperature range, from idle to maximum load. Please note that instead of giving you the absolute numbers, we are showing the temperature delta, which is the difference between the actual temperature and the ambient room temperature.

The 600 GB WD VelociRaptor was, surprisingly, the coolest hard disk drive when the computer is idling. Its maximum surface temperature was just 0.8 °C above ambient temperature! At peak load though, it was slightly hotter than the 300 GB VelociRaptor. However, that was still much cooler than the peak operating temperatures of the 2 TB Western Digital Caviar Black and the 1.5 TB Samsung EcoGreen F2 hard disk drives.

WinBench 99 Version 2.0

Platter Data Transfer Profile

Although the Western Digital VelociRaptor has an official maximum platter-to-buffer transfer rate of 145 MB/s, the maximum platter transfer rate seems to be about 154 MB/s, which progressively dropped across the platter to about 97 MB/s at the last track. The platter quality is superb in this sample, with no noticeable dips which would suggest the use of replacement sectors.

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