7200.12 1tb performance

[darkling]

I have this Seagate 7200.12 1tb drive and i ran some benchmarks on it. I have it installed in AHCI mode in a single SATA port with latest intel sata drivers.It has 2 partitions C and D. Both Crystaldiskmark and HDTune show good results in the read/write transfer speeds but the actual file transfer speed is dreadful. HDTune reports average write speed 92mb/s and Crystaldiskmark shows 125mb/s read and write speeds. I don't have the screens now i am at work. The main thing i have noticed is when installing a game takes a long time to install and also copying a file from C to D starts about 60mb/s to 35mb/s. Is this normal for SATA2 drives? Should i invest in an SSD and have this as a backup drive and storage for videos and music? Or there is something wrong with the file system and it is not taking full advantage of the disk's speed?

Edit : The OS is Windows 7 Pro 64 bit, and the main question for this thread is should i invest in a faster SATA2 drive like the Spinpoints or the Caviar Black or should i go right to an SSD drive

 

[gracefully]

First, those benchmarks measure raw throughput. That means you're not doing anything else on the drive, it's just writing or reading. When you're doing an actual file transfer, for example from one partition to the other, You're reading something from a specific area of the drive then writing to a different area of the drive. Factor in the read/write head's travel time (it can do the repositioning at up to 60 times per second end-to-end), and you'll understand why your performance is lower. This is to be expected from a mechanical HDD.

Of course, the SSD will offer astronomical performance compared to the HDD. Personally, I'm also saving up for an SSD.

Long story short, that's normal for your drive.

 

[rogier]

What exactly are you trying to accompkish? Do you want more speed as you are constantly moving files between the partitions? If so it kind of makes me wonder why you went for multiple partitions in the first place.

As for game install times, what do you see as a long time? 10 minutes, half a day? Remember that most games these day can take up around 7 gigs of your hdd so quite logically it'll take a bit of time to install.

SSD is really nice but costly. Think of what you'll really gain before buying anything.

As for the differences between the benchmarks and actual speed, I'll leave that one to the smarter people on this forum

 

[darkling]

It isn't a matter of what i do in daily basis, no i don't move files around all day. And the install times take about 10 minutes to install a game of 8gb. And about the copy from one partition to another i think it makes sense since the disks reads and writes at the same time. My concern is that the HDD is bottlenecking the system since it is an i5 750 (oced) and 4gb ram. I think there's not much i can do to optimize the disk system, i was thinking of reformatting, maybe i will wait for the SSD prices to drop down a bit.

 

[gracefully]

The HDD is ALWAYS the bottleneck in a system.

Game installs probably take 10 minutes because you might be installing from a DVD, which is slower than a HDD, or you're installing it to the same HDD that the installer is in, which brings up a similar scenario to copying files from one partition to another.

In any case, that's probably all you can expect from your hard drive. Don't be too hard on it.

 

[darkling]

^ If daemon tools map the iso or whatever on the same drive then that is the issue. The installer both reads and writes at the same disk. So i guess formatting it will bring me again to the place that i am right now. I did however came across the HDTune health screen which showed me some errors but searching the web i found that this is normal on Seagate drives. Anyway i ran a full chkdsk on both partitions which took about 2 hours and it reported clean. I guess i will have to wait for that Corsair F60 drive price to drop a bit, that is a sweet SSD.

 

[rogier]

Waiting till the prices drop a bit might indeed be wise. I think that at the moment the prices for an SSD are a tad too high.

However I've currently got a pc running with an SSD for the OS and 2 HDD on raid0 for storage. It all works nice and I mainly spent the cash to see how it would work out.

It's really nice and fast but again, good to buy if you want to experiment and mess around. For the speed increase in every day use I'd wait for a bit.

 

[darkling]

Well i already spent money for the new rig but went cheepo with the HDD. Anyway if i was to deploy an SSD solution, that 7200.12 will do just fine for storage.

P.S. isn't RAID 0 supposed to be the fastest but not safe setup? and you use it as storage?

 

[rogier]

You're correct on the raid0, but I only use it as storage on that specific pc. An automatic backup is done to a NAS which I backup to an external HDD (might be a bit overkill, but more and more personal stuff goes on the pc these days).

I mainly setup the raid0 as a trial run for other things and decided to keep it.

 

[darkling]

Having the 7200.12 1TB already and if i want to improve the PC as far as the disk system i have 3 options :

1)get two small cheap 7200rpm sata2 and raid 0 them for the OS and some games
2)get one more 500gb disk so the I/O is split into 2 disks
3)wait for SSD price drops

I can't think of another solution below 100$ that will speed up the disk system.

 

[gracefully]

We're all suckers for speed, that much is true. The question is, are we ready to spend for speed?

1. Plausible. If you want to try it, go ahead.

2. That doesn't help with throughput, though. It will only be beneficial if you're accessing both of them simultaneously. It won't enhance max speed.

3. Best option IMO.

The most important thing for perceived speed is random read/write performance. In that respect, all HDDs suck like hell. They can't even get 1 MB/s random read/write, while SSDs can do 100 MB/s with ease, with the most expensive solutions able to top out at 300.

 

[darkling]

Was watching the price history of the Corsair F60 which i am interested in buying and for 8 months now it hovers from 120 to 115 euros (i live in Greece). The only thing that encourages me is that when it came out it was set at 230 euros. I think most people are still buying the small sized SSDs for OS and 2-3 games that's why the price is still the same. When the market starts moving towards the larger SSDs the prices will drop i think. Except there is a new drive technology that will make SSDs obsolete but i doubt it. Even SATAIII didn't cut it. People still buying SATA2 drives.

 

[gracefully]

Personally, I think I can live with a 120GB boot drive. The new Intel 320 series seems attractive, but I'll wait a little for possible problems to rear their ugly heads. My current motherboard doesn't have SATA3 ports, and I don't want to get an expansion card just for that.

 

[darkling]

How is that CrystalDiskMark scores? Can't compare them with something...

http://img861.imageshack.us/i/1442011.png/

 

[gracefully]

I looked at this: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/vertex-3-sandforce-ssd,2869-8.html

It only showed sequential R/W, but SSDs have astronomical random R/W performance.

 

[darkling]

Anyone with SATA2 CrystalDiskMark results?