About Hard Drive Data
Hard Drive Data reads the published specifications of 278 drives and works out what an ordinary one in each class looks like, so any particular drive can be placed against it.
What this site is
It is a comparison built from manufacturers’ own published figures, read the same way for every drive in the corpus. It covers 6 classes, and comparisons are made inside a class because a median across all of them would describe nothing anyone is shopping for.
Who writes it
Corin Vale, which is a pen name, and this page says so rather than implying a masthead that does not exist. What stands behind the work is not a credential: it is that the method is written down, applied identically to every drive, and documented where it fails.
What we do not claim
We do not test drives. There is no lab here, no benchmark run and no sample units, and no page on this site will imply otherwise. A manufacturer’s figure can be optimistic or measured under conditions it does not disclose; we can check a figure against its own class, and we cannot check it against reality.
Corrections
If a figure here is wrong we would like to know which one. A drive, a field, and what the listing actually says is enough to act on. Send it here, and the methodology page sets out how the corpus is built.