jmke

Our hard drive test platform has served admirably for more than four and a half years now. We first started using the system in early 2005, a time that seems oh-so long ago. Back then, bundles of garbage sub-prime mortgages were sought-after AAA securities, my inbox was flooded with spam pimping herbal Viagra rather than Acai Berry, and I'd never heard of Heidi Montag or Spencer Pratt. Those were the days.

Among PC enthusiasts, a gigabyte was still considered to be quite a lot of system memory. Windows was arguably in a better place with XP, albeit at only 32 bits. We at least had 64-bit CPUs, but only solitary cores—Athlon 64s and, shudder, Prescott Pentium 4s. The GPUs of the day were DirectX 9 parts with discrete pixel and vertex shaders, and not very many of either.

We've come a long way in four and a half years. During that time, our venerable test rig has seen no fewer than 70 different storage solutions run its gauntlet. It's punished everything from 10k-RPM Raptors to exotic solid-state drives to 2.5" mobile hard drives at three different spindle speeds. And, of course, it's chewed through a cornucopia of 3.5" desktop drives.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/17183

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