I went through my stash of hard drives, which I accumulated over past ~15 years to check which of them are still working, while doing so I run some benchmarks to compare their performance and see how HDDs evolved in the past decade. Here are the results!

Test setup

Ryzen 9 3900X
ASRock X570 Taichi
GSkill F4-3200C14D-32GTZKW (2x16GB B-Die)
Samsung 980Pro 1TB (system)
Palit Gamerock Premium GTX1080

HDDs in test

Model	Capacity	Form factor	RPM	Manufactured
Samsung SP2504C	250GB	3.5”	7200	02/2006
Samsung HD103SJ	1TB	3.5”	7200	09/2009
WD Scorpio Blue WD3200BEVT	320GB	2.5”	5400	11/2010
WD Blue WD10EZEX	1TB	3.5”	7200	10/2014
Seagate ST4000DM000	4TB	3.5”	5900	12/2015
Seagate Barracude ST4000DM005	4TB	3.5”	5900	04/2017
Toshiba X300 HDWR21C	12TB	3.5”	7200	08/2021

CrystalDiskMark

Sequential 1M

Crystal Disk Mark Sequential

The fastest drive (HDWR21C) is more than 3 times faster than the slowest one (SP2504C)!

Random 4K

Crystal Disk Mark Random 4K

With 4k transfers we can also see some improvements over the years, although not as big as with sequential read/write. Not to mention that any SSD will actually “demolish” those results.