Maximum Surface Temperature

We monitored the surface temperature of five 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 750 GB WD Scorpio Black hard disk drive may spin at 7200 RPM, but it actually idles at a lower temperature than the 640 GB Western Digital Scorpio Blue, which spins at 5400 RPM. In fact, it was actually idles at a lower temperature than the 250 GB Seagate Momentus 5400.5. On the other hand, ramping it up to full speed greatly increased its surface temperature, making it the second-hottest drive in this comparison, just behind the non-AFT 500 GB Scorpio Black.

Platter Data Transfer Profile

The maximum platter transfer rate appeared to be about 130 MB/s which progressively dropped across the platter to about 66 MB/s at the last track. The platter quality seems to be very good in this sample, with no visible dips which would suggest the use of replacement sectors. Please ignore the initial dip, as that is an artifact due to the benchmark.

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