Hitachi 1TB HD: Additional Tests

Following request from numerous readers, we have performed a new set of benchmarks with the Hitachi 3.5" 1TB HD (Xbench results being too unreliable).
We have been using ZoneBench 1.3.1 which is part of the powerful but expensive SpeedTools Utilities.
This software measure reading and writing performance of the drive at the beginning and at the end of the HD plates (respectively the fastest and slowest area). It provides interesting information:
- One can obtain the highest and lowest performance level.
- One can use a drive already loaded with data without modifying the result.
- It can be used on a booting volume without affecting its performance.
To avoid biased results due to the cache memory, we have been using a 60MB file.
Hereafter is the result obtained with a Hitachi:

In dark red is the reading speed, while the writing speed is displayed in light red bar. As we originally reported it, the high speed is 80MB/s but it is 2 fold slower when the disk is getting full.
Hereafter is the result obtained by a RAID 0 composed of two Raptor 150:

There is a huge difference between reading and writing speed. When the disk is getting full, performance are strongly impacted, as reading speed dropped 2-fold while writing is 3 times slower.

Last but not least, the result obtained by the original 250GB Western Digital HD shipped with the Mac Pro:

Its performance level is 25% lower than the Hitachi 1TB unit.
One should also mention that this benchmarking does not take into account access time. We could not get a software running on OS X and able to measure this value. But one can get a good estimate by looking at the data we published yesterday about duplicating large files.