Hard Drive Speeds

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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.

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Sorry! I was referring to these new electro-mechanical traditional HDDs. Whilst an SDD does not require defragmentation (it is a waste of time and counter-productive), the old style drives with read/write heads still do.

Microsoft have erred on the side of caution, and the last time I read about this, they would defragment about 1 out of 5,000 SDDs sampled, but miss about 15% of regular HDDs. With these newer HDDs, that percentage will be a lot higher. In the case of the drive I mention in this thread, that would be 100%.

So, what I am suggesting is that if you have a recent EM HDD you may well need to manually defrag it, as it may be misidentified as an SSD?

:)

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Don't those guys usually place the components of a thumb drive into a larger case... then resell it as an external hard drive?

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Not really, as most external HDDs are just a traditional electro-mechanical drive crammed into a fancy looking case with no adequate ventilation.......... where it sweats until it dies.:(

Whilst the solid state memory aspect is pretty much the same, thumb drives are rather more complex in their operation and work a lot slower.

For example a USB2 thumb drive will give you transfer rates of maybe 10~18 MBps, whilst an electro-mechanical drive will give you more like 30MBps over the same USB2 connection.

USB3 will certainly up the ante, as it has to operate beyond 60MBps (the maximum for USB2). However, you can now get external SATA connections, that would make external SSDs more competitive, particularly as they don't have the heat problem that regular HDDs do.

I think he's referring to some of those dodgy external usb HDD that are regulary sold on e-bay.

pop the casing and it's just a glued down usb stick with a few nuts & bolts to make it feel legit weight wise.

Interesting!

I hadn't even heard of that scam until now.

How can you hope to get away with it though?.......... a stick drive would run at half speed and fill up in no time?

:confused:

Doesnt Ebay have some sort of protection against this? Ive never used it but surely you cant just sell "scams" on there.

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Originally Posted by nihil

Interesting!

I hadn't even heard of that scam until now.

How can you hope to get away with it though?.......... a stick drive would run at half speed and fill up in no time?

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Basically they advertise it as a 500GB external drive for example, when in reality it's only a 200gb thumbdrive.
They scammers setup the usb stick into "loop" mode so that it appears as 500GB when in fact once 200gb has been written it loops and overwrites the new data, Giving the impression that all the new data is being copied.

Unless you check once the copy has completed and compare file size / directory structure then you would be none the wiser. Obviously if you did check afterwards then you would straight away spot the issue and do further investigation.

Here's some pictures i posted in Addicts awhile back.

This unit was marked as a 160Gb external HDD, when infact it was only sporting a 250mb thumb-drive, it was set into "loop" mode so it would display as 160GB under My Computer or via Disk management etc.

Thus once the stick was full it would loop and continue copying without displaying any type of error messages ie: Low on disk space. So unsuspecting l00ser would be none the wiser until they went to access there "Backed Up" data to find only 250mb worth of corrupted data

http://www.antionline.com/

http://www.antionline.com/

http://i207.photobucket.com/albums/b...ode/f160g3.jpg

http://www.antionline.com/

http://www.antionline.com/

http://www.antionline.com/

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Originally Posted by Cider

Doesnt Ebay have some sort of protection against this? Ive never used it but surely you cant just sell "scams" on there.

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Ebay protection is absolutely worthless. ;) & Considering E-bay & paypal are ran by the same parent company. I've lost count on the amount of "Horror" stories regarding e-bay scams, And innocent Sellers & Buyers getting reamed via both E-Bay & PayPal due to scammers.

ie here's a story about a rare authentic violin being shredded due to PayPal siding with a no-good scammer. Item was sold via E-bay & paid via PayPal.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/04/pay...ause-it-cares/

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Regretsy reader Erica sold an ostensibly rare violin to an eBay buyer who paid using Paypal. The buyer disputed the authenticity of the instrument and asked for his money back. Rather than handle it amicably with Erica, the buyer went to Paypal who advised them to supply proof that the item had been destroyed and they would refund the money. The buyer then shredded the violin into chowder and sent a handsome photo to Paypal and Erica. Paypal refunded the money.

This left Erica in a tight spot. She no longer had the money and the item she was attempting to sell was shredded. Actually, that’s the end of the story: violin shredded, money taken away. It is, in a word, heartbreaking.

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:rofl:

OK. I have now tried the Seagate ST1500DM003-9YN1 (1,500GB).

These were boxed retail versions from CnMemory, a German outfit. They are SATA II connected.

Transfer rates as follows:

Minimum 86/65MBps
Maximum 200/202MBps
Average 154/134MBps

Manufacture date was March 2012, Chinese origin.

Again, the performance is way above drives I was buying before the Thai floods, but is nothing like the 1,000GB drives I mentioned earlier. Also there is a fair difference in performance between the two 1,500GB drives although they were bought at the same time from the same source.

Johnno.

Curious are you using the default inbuilt windows copy / cut and taking the details from the little box that pops up?

Or are you using an actual BenchMark Program? If so what are you using?

IE:>

• DiskSpeed
• SiSoft Sandra Lite?

Also i may have missed but what are the system specs that your doing these tests on?

Hi, sorry about that mate, I should have been a bit more informative.

I have two test rigs, both running Windows 8 Release Preview.

Rig #1

Intel Core i7 2600K (stock settings) [32nm SandyBridge] 3.4~3.8GHz + Hyperthreading
8GB DDR3 1333MHz [Crucial Ballistix]
OCZ 120GB SATA III SDD as the primary drive
AMD/ATI Radeon HD6770

Rig #2

Intel Core i5 3570K (stock settings) [22nm IvyBridge] 3.4~3.8GHz NOT Hyperthtraded
8GB DDR3 1600MHz [G-Skill Ripjaws]
OCZ 120GB SATA III as the primary drive
AMD/ATI Radeon HD6870

The benchmark software that I am using is HDD Tune v2.55.........the free SANDRA doesn't seem to work with Win8?

I think that it might be interesting to try the new Seagates on AMD rigs to see if this is just an "Intel phenomenon"???