HD Tach is another disk benchmark very similar to HD Tune, except is uses a different algorithm to access the disk. Bearing this in mind, these two bench’s usually give slightly different numbers, but neither is more accurate than the other. They simply give us two sets of data to include in our comparisons.

As expected you can see the VelociRaptor/s did quite well all around!  Clearly the winner in burst speeds, and much improved in every test over the previous generation Raptor X. Concerning CPU Utilization, the results are inconclusive as the test has a margin of error of +/- 2%. This puts all the data within the programs run-to-run variance. The Patriot SSD absolutely slaughters Random Access Times, which is a huge advantage of SSD. Keeping that in mind though, the Raptor sports very attractive times for a mechanical drive. Although the Patriot Warp V2 also beats out a single raptor in transfer speed, keep in mind the Raptors cost/gb is less than $1.00 while the Warp’s is cost/gb is over $2.00. Although in the near future I expect SSD’s to come down enough in price to make them more than competitive with platter drives. So you must choose between speed and storage, I believe the Raptor takes the middle road with a bit of both.