Is this bad performance for Samsung F3?

A score of 5.9 is normal. It's still the best score you could get from a 7200 RPM drive (possibly even from any HDD)

I'm not sure about the HD Tune results.

I have 2 of those drives, but they aren't installed yet. I'm still waiting on other parts from Newegg.

Thank you for your replies! It was good to know that these kind of numbers would be expected.

One question I have is that the transfer rate seems to be between 52 MB/sec and 142 MB/sec. However, I seems to remember that the drive should be able to transfer up to 300 MB/sec, and to that these numbers looks low?

300MB is the SATA bus transfer speed, you will never saturate the bus with a mechanical HDD. In fact that's it's theoretical max, but no SATA controller is able to sustain the maximum theoretical speed. The fastest SSD's top out at about 260MB/s or so, whether this is the controller pooping out or the SSD's is the limiter is hard to tell because it is so close the the bus' maximum speed.

I think you are getting exactly what you should see in HDTune. Nothing to worry about.

On another note, it's amazing how fast everything else has gotten and how HDD's have plod along with only incremental speed improvements. It seems we have reached the physical limits of mechanical drive technology. We can grow the size, but without drastically increasing spindle RPM's we are not going to see much in the way of speed increases.

Thank you for your reply!

What would be the reason for the new SATA3 with 6gbit/s if it is not possible to get near that speed anyway?

For the upcoming Solid State Drives. They already boost speeds over 250MBps, and getting faster.

It is said that the next generation Intel SSD will be SATA III. Only a couple are out now, and are $$$$$.

Thank you. It is good to know that it is normal what I see.

Best answer selected by ricno.

yeah that speed isn't bad, its a little under half of my 4 x 640GB WD Blue set (RAID-0)

ricno wrote:


You might be able to reach 300MB/sec if you were on the SATA 3 Bus and had raid 0. A single drive cannot reach that speed. Only an SSD can.
[/quote]


techgeek wrote:


I really do not agree with the fact that we won't see mechanical drives getting better and faster. I think mechanical hard drives are going to progress extremely...not as fast as SSD's but very fast, because busnisses and companies aren't switching to SSD's anytime soon so its in the best internest for big HDD makers to keep progressing. Plus the more space an HDD holds, the faster it is becuase data density is higher. For example, the spinpoint has 1 500GB platter. Eventually it might be a 1TB single platter...meaning data density will be way higher so for the same RPM, the drive can access much more data in a much quicker time. Not just that but the HDD platters can get more dense and smaller in size, plus higher RPM's will be viable with more advanced technology...say 20,000rpm+.

Oh and my SSD gets top read speed of 275mbps sometimes but for the most part its 268mbps.

We already have fast drives in business, they're SAS drives with spindle speeds of 10K and 15K. They are prohibitively expensive and still nowhere near saturating the bus speed of SATA II. Usually under 150MB/s average. This is still only half the theoretical speed of SATA II. I think the best you'll see in the near future is 10-20MB/s more. That is the best case scenario for mechanical drives I'm afraid. If you look at past history, HDD's have made very small increases in speed. We hit a wall for density and then switched to perpendicular recording, this increased the speed a small amount. More importantly it increased data density allowing larger volumes without increasing the number of platters. I personally believe the future is SSD's. They are still new and therefore expensive. Once the NAND flash manufacturers spin up to supply demand for fast large capacity flash chips, you'll see prices come down and volume size increase.

I also agree SSD are the future...but they are the FAR future. Businesses will still be on HDD's for a very very very very long time and as long as they are, manufacturers will continue advancing HDD's.