Are these normal? (with pics)

[wbirkin]

the transfer and burst rates for the caviar is much better than a raptor, and uses less cpu cycles, And the access time for both the sata caviar and the maxtor pata is almost the same. My $300 150 gig hd is being beaten by a $130 750 gig hd. That doesnt sound right?! Would setting the jumper on my sata drives (ncq jumpers) improve things?

Maxtor IDE-PATA

WD Raptor 150 SATA

WD Caviar SATAII 750

 

[SomeJoe7777]

No, your Raptor 150ADFD is not beaten by a $130 hard drive. Your 750GB drive has a higher transfer rate at the beginning of the drive, but slightly lower at the end. The average transfer rate is only higher than the Raptor's by 6MB/sec.

The transfer rate is nice, but is less important for day-to-day tasks than the access time. If you will note, the access time of the Raptor destroys the other two hard drives by about 40%.

The burst rate is virtually irrelevant for real-world performance.

And the CPU usage figure is highly inaccurate, and miniscule anyway.

If you do some real-world tests on your drives, you'll find that the Raptor still outperforms your 750GB.

 

[wbirkin]

wow thanks for the explanation bro!

 

[cyberjock]

Yep. SomeJoe7777 is right. But he's also wrong about being slightly lower at the end. Check out the numbers again, you'll see the Raptor is actually slower in all 3 MB/sec tests, but pwns the seek time.

Even with that little correction, the seek time is what matters most for day to day activities. Unless you are doing tasks that involve reading a few very large files sequentially or something, your seek time is what matters the most.

 

[SomeJoe7777]

But he's also wrong about being slightly lower at the end. Check out the numbers again, you'll see the Raptor is actually slower in all 3 MB/sec tests

The numbers shown on the right of the HD Tune window show lower on the Raptor, but those numbers are the result of the inverted peaks in the graph. Those brief spikes of low transfer rate are caused by background Windows tasks interrupting the benchmark, and are not indicative of actual poor performance by the hard drive.

So, if you ignore those inverted peaks, the 750GB drive ends up at 48 MB/sec at the very tail end of the graph, while the Raptor is faster at 51 MB/sec.

 

[wbirkin]

low transfer rate are caused by background Windows tasks interrupting the benchmark,

that might be the cause of those inverted spikes. My raptor has the os, the 750 gig has only the media files and the maxtor has no files on it.

 

[rodney_ws]

Well, now that you have data... why not reverse the drives. Put your OS on the larger drive and let a clean Raptor have a go... something tells me the performance will tilt heavily in favor of the Raptor in that scenario. I'm pretty sure Tom's has a good deal of benchmarks covering that 150 GB Raptor... if I recall, it beat every drive out there EXCEPT the 74 GB Raptor.