4 yr old caviar se16 vs new caviar blue

jhyukkang

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Sep 1, 2007
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hello, i have been using caviar se16 320GB for my boot drive for windows 7. and i found caviar blue 500GB on sale so i bought it for 40ish dollars.
i used acronis(?) WD edition from WD site to clone my disk on to the new one.
and i benchmarked load times on both drives. windows loads 4 secs faster than old drive, and for game load benchmark, i measured loading time of crysis. and difference was 3 seconds.

do these numbers represent decent hdd upgrade?

old drive is 3200aaks with 2 160GB platters i believe and new one is 5000aakx 1 500GB platter.

hd tune shows that 3200aaks gets 75MB max, 35MB min, 60MB Avg, 13.5ms Seek.
5000aakx gets 127MB max, 60MB min, 100MB Avg, 15.8ms Seek.

i thought this is big improvement in terms of numbers, but real world performance doesnt show much difference.

Im thinking because of new drive has slower seek...
btw these drives are cloned. exact same files, capacity, windows updates and whatnot.
also, for more accurate data, I started timing when hdd was idle. (i dont want some other software to access data on drive while im timing)

thanks for reading and let me know ur opinion on my small upgrade performance
 

jhyukkang

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Sep 1, 2007
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18,980
ok i ran defragment for both drives to be equal, from each operating system. and i did same thing for the windows boot time.
new drive is about 7 sec faster on boot, 2sec faster on turn off.. i guess this is the final data..
its not too bad right? now i need to decide if i want to give up 7 sec and get more secondary storage drive or not lol