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Thread: Hard Drive Speeds

  1. #1
    Senior Member nihil's Avatar
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    Hard Drive Speeds

    OK, I am sure that many of you know the Windows Experience Index that ships with Vista and Windows 7?

    A conventional electro-mechanical 7,200rpm HDD will score 5.9. That is also true for Windows 8.

    I just got two Seagate Barracudas (made in China......that's new) and loaded Win8 Release Preview onto one of them...............I got a WEI of 7.45!!!

    I checked both of them (on different machines) with HD Tune v2.55 and got these readings in Megabytes/sec:

    Average 162.5/166.5
    Minimum 92.5/96.9
    Maximum 201.4/211.1

    That's around twice the speed of any other HDD I have, and some are no more than 9 months old. Those values are for the whole 1000GB.....these are not hybrid drives.

    Something has happened

    So watch out for the bargains as they try to offload old stock!

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    nihil, which version(s) / model(s) did you get.

    Might want to upgrade myself.

  3. #3
    Senior Member nihil's Avatar
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    Hi Shay,

    They are the Barracuda ST1000DM003-9YN162 and are SATA III connecting. The connection probably doesn't matter as the one that is slaved is on a SATA II board. After all, SATA II is supposed to support transfer rates of up to 370MB/sec, and we are not getting anywhere near that.



    EDIT: I forgot to mention that they seem to hold a transfer rate above 150MB/sec for about 70% of the drive.

    Temperatures seem normal around 25~27C against an ambient of about 22C.
    Last edited by nihil; June 28th, 2012 at 10:55 AM.

  4. #4
    Gonzo District BOFH westin's Avatar
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    I haven't used Seagate in years. I have sort of a grudge against them. I have had so many of their drives crap out on me... The SAN where I work was filled with Seagates, and shortly after the warranty was up, the drives started going out one by one. We have replaced most of them with Western Digital drives, and have had pretty good luck. It might just be a fluke, but I can't bring myself to buy anything from Seagate anymore.
    \"Those of us that had been up all night were in no mood for coffee and donuts, we wanted strong drink.\"

    -HST

  5. #5
    Senior Member nihil's Avatar
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    Western Digital were pretty well drowned in the Thai floods............these Seagates came with a bright orange life-jacket (OEM, not boxed) they are made in China so the only Seagate is on the label. They used to come from Thailand as well IIRC?

    There have been several HDD mergers and business/market takeovers in the past few years and I seem to remember that there was some deal with the Chinese government............afraid I can't remember the details

    Seems that we have something of a cartel situation now, so the general consensus that I am getting is that prices will stay firm until at least Q1 2014. However, with this sort of stuff on the market, it should force a drop in older technology, and even in the lower performing SSDs that were really taking the P1$$ up to now IMO. If the WEI is to be believed, a score of over 7 means that the SATA II SSDs don't have a lot to offer.

    Personally, I have a couple of machines with the traditional (WEI= 5.9) drives in them. If I see some of them going cheap, I would be in the market for a couple of the old SSDs to run the OS and critical apps.

    Problem is, SSDs fit laptops and run cool, so there is a competitor market for those over 120GB? Not that I would need more than that for the OS and a few apps?

    We shall see ......

  6. #6
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    Quote Originally Posted by nihil View Post
    Hi Shay,

    They are the Barracuda ST1000DM003-9YN162 and are SATA III connecting. The connection probably doesn't matter as the one that is slaved is on a SATA II board. After all, SATA II is supposed to support transfer rates of up to 370MB/sec, and we are not getting anywhere near that.



    EDIT: I forgot to mention that they seem to hold a transfer rate above 150MB/sec for about 70% of the drive.

    Temperatures seem normal around 25~27C against an ambient of about 22C.


    Thank you very much!
    Those would work great in a eSATA enclosure. Back up data for both the laptop and Desktops. In a timely manner too!!

  7. #7
    Senior Member nihil's Avatar
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    Those would work great in a eSATA enclosure. Back up data for both the laptop and Desktops. In a timely manner too!!
    Sure, and it has made me reconsider what builds really need/justify an SSD as primary?

    I would say that most home/SOHO/office rigs will be plenty fast with one of those.


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    Senior Member nihil's Avatar
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    WARNING! AutoDefrag won't work

    I'll post this here rather than in a separate thread, as it certainly applies to drives like this.

    Windows Vista and 7 have a built in defragmentation scheduled to run once a week.

    Because it is not considered a good idea, and a waste of time to defragment solid state drives, they run a little test first.

    Windows will consider this to be an SSD and won't run the defragmenter, so you will need to do that manually

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    Good catch!!

  10. #10
    HYBR|D
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    Quote Originally Posted by nihil View Post
    I'll post this here rather than in a separate thread, as it certainly applies to drives like this.

    Windows Vista and 7 have a built in defragmentation scheduled to run once a week.

    Because it is not considered a good idea, and a waste of time to defragment solid state drives, they run a little test first.

    Windows will consider this to be an SSD and won't run the defragmenter, so you will need to do that manually
    Unless i'm reading your post wrong Nihil, There's no need to Defrag a SSD as majority SSD makers inlude optimized technique that utilizes the "TRIM" command.

    Ironically Win 7 automagically detects & utilizes the "TRIM" command when a SSD is connected / detected.

    Thus it will automagically stop auto defragging weekly & will disable the defrag on startup option also.

    & for those that obviously have 0 understanding on wtf i'm talking about maybe this will help you understand...



    You should never defrag an SSD. Don't even think about it. The reason is that physical data placement on an SSD is handled solely by the SSD's firmware, and what it reports to Windows is NOT how the data is actually stored on the SSD.
    This means that the physical data placement a defragger shows in it's fancy sector chart has nothing to do with reality. The data is NOT where Windows thinks it is, and Windows has no control over where the data is actually placed.
    To even out usage on its internal memory chips SSD firmware intentionally splits data up across all of the SSD's memory chips, and it also moves data around on these chips when it isn't busy reading or writing (in an attempt to even out chip usage.)
    Windows never sees any of this, so if you do a defrag Windows will simply cause a whole bunch of needless I/O to the SSD and this will do nothing except decrease the useful life of the SSD.

    For further reading:> http://helpdeskgeek.com/featured-pos...defrag-an-ssd/
    Last edited by HYBR|D; July 2nd, 2012 at 03:07 PM.

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