We have benchmark threads for Processors and for RAM, so here's a thread for Harddrive Benchmarking.
The utility I've chosen for analysis purposes is HD Tune v2.52.
I'm sure you might have a preference for different harddrive benchmarking software. I chose HD Tune because it seems to offer a reliable and consistent test (giving me almost exactly the same results every time I ran it on a single harddrive). It also gives a nice graphical display, and offers several values with which to compare harddrives (access/seek time, transfer rates, CPU usage, etc). In addition, it's a handy tool to monitor the temperature of your drives. I'm using the default analysis options, with the slider quite close to the Accurate side of the scale.
You can get it from the official website -
www.hdtune.com. It's just 638,777 bytes (around 623kb).
OK, so onto the benchmarks. I have several different harddrives in my home machine, so I took several screenshots. NOTE: To take a screenshot of just a single window, and not your entire screen, make sure that the window you want to screencap has got focus by clicking on it, then press ALT and the PrintScreen key together. You can then paste that screenshot into any image editing software, like Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro or event MS Paint. Save the result as a PNG or a JPG file (with low compression), and upload it as an attachment in your post.
Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 250Gb 7200RPM 8mb SATA II (HDT722525DLA380)
Note the high burst transfer rate (182.7mb/s). I had to use Hitachi's native harddrive tool to manually enable SATA II on the drive - before I did that, the burst transfer rate was around 70mb/s slower. I might still have to replicate the procedure on the 320Gb Seagate, which I only got a week or 2 ago.
Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 Plus 200Gb 7200RPM 8mb IDE (ST3200822A)
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320Gb 7200RPM 8mb SATA II (ST3320620AS) [Perpendicular]
Seagate ST320014A 20Gb 5400RPM 2mb IDE (ST320014A) Crummy storage drive in my office machine.
Let's see the results for your drives! Please include some technical details about the drive/s that you post.