RAID arrays 1TB SATA drives Here is the results of comparing 80G, 160G, and 1T SATA disks. It's interesting to see that the 1T disk can sustain 113MB/s for the outer tracks, it's the first time I've seen a single disk sustain more than about 90MB/s! One thing to note is that the 1TB disks (from Seagate and WD) are the same size and have just over 10^12 bytes, which is significantly less than 2^40 which is the number that most people think about when the term "tera" is used in the context of computers. Laptop Hard drives Here are the results in graphical form comparing the hard drives of an early 1998 Thinkpad 380XD and a late 1999 600E: As you can see (especially in the case of the 600 series) there are a number of zones giving different levels of performance. The graph for the 600 series shows nice plateaus because I used 30 iterations. From memory I think I only used a small number of iterations for the 380 series, I expect that I would get a nicer graph if I was to redo the test with more iterations. The number of zones on the disk surprised me. I was only expecting 3 or at most 4. One thing to note is that the 380xd has a much slower hard drive, but the fastest part of it's drive is almost as fast as the slowest part of the 600e's drive. It is quite easy to imagine scenarios