Speed of internal SATA Ports with Mac OS X

Today I retested a few Hitachi 7K2000 hard drives that I had previously tested and reviewed, using the Mac Pro internal SATA ports on my quad-core 3.33GHz Mac Pro Nehalem.

To my astonishment, the drives were faster than I had previously tested (not just the same model, the exact same drives I had tested before).

Previously, I had never seen a read speed above 135MB/sec for the Hitachi 7K2000, and that was the best of 10 drives, with some samples reading as low as 123MB/sec.

Today, here is what I measured using DiskTester run-sequential with two samples of the 7K2000.

Sample 1: 133 / 140
Sample 2: 130 / 136
(Write/read in MB/sec)

It’s nice to get a free speed upgrade.