Sequential Read or Burst performance for system/boot drive?

Tough. I think that access time would be the most important metric in a boot drive, but is the small advantage in this enough to offset the disparity in read speed? I don't know.

Burst speed is the speed of the interface (SATA) and the DRAM cachechip - not of the mechanical harddrive itself. The number is basically useless.

If you want to test system disk performance, download HDTune Pro evaluation and run the Random Access test. Or download CrystalDiskMark and look at random 4K - or AS SSD which is very similar.

Tried both benchmark tools, got mixed and weird results:


Looks like the WD is a bit better at reading, and much better at writing. But the odd thing is, why is the 2nd partition on the WD drive faster than the first?? D: Shouldn't it be the other way around? ...


HD Tune, however, reports the Seagate to be slightly faster on 4KB and smaller when the full capacity is tested. If I test only 40GB (with the checkbox) then the WD drive takes the lead, at 0.538 MB/s vs 0.419 MB/s.

So, a few questions...
Which benchmark should I trust more?
Why does CrystalDiskMark report the 2nd partition to be faster than the first? (First partition is about 195 GB, second is 736 GB.)
Does the partition layout affect performance? Should I change the one I have above?
I'm running in IDE mode. Is it recommended to switch to AHCI?

Thanks for reading over all this!

My apologies for double posting.. it seems I'm not allowed to edit my post.

Would the 40GB test in HD Tune be more important than the full capacity one, as the OS would be stored within that first 40GB? Or is this a flawed assumption?