How to choose a HDD by comparing HD Tune results?

[hunted22]

Hello everyone..

I don't really understand HD Tune results.. I do understand that the higher average transfer rate the better, and access time should be low, but should you get a hard drive with the higher t.r and lower a.t or get the one with the higher a.c but lower t.r ??
or should you look for something else which more important?

I dont really need to get into hard drives specs and comparison, what I want is to understand HD Tune and understand how to use it to determine which HDD is better.

Thank you in advance.

 

[John_VanKirk]

Hello,

For an individual computer enthusiast, HD Tune is used to compare their Drive speed to a baseline if you think there's a problem, or specs reported by others. HD Tune (PRO) gives you max, min, avg transfer speeds, as well as latency. In general the faster the speed, the lower the access time.

When comparing one drive's speed & latency to another, a reviewer will give you multiple screenshots of diferent Drives, using HD Tune (or other testing app) for comparison. It's not something you would normally do individually. You might pick a specific HDD or SSD to use, from these reports.

You might test a Drive you have, to see if the reported info compares to reported reviews, or to a baseline you did when the drive was new.
I had an older PATA HDD couple years ago, used for back-up that was taking a long time. Ran HD Tune Pro and found it's transfer rate was ~5MB/s, compared to the specs of ~30MB/s. Sent it in with a copy of the screenshot, got a new replacement back in two days.

Another important area HD Tune is helpful (not related to speed) is the Disk Health section, where it gives you the SMART data, and a heads up of an impending drive failure or out of spec parameter.

Hope that's helpful.

 

[noidea_77]

And in addition to what John_VanKirk said: it highly dependent on your needs. If you want to use the disk for you OS, a low seek time is important, because your OS will read a large number of small files spread all over the disk. If you want to store large files like backups or videos on the disk, a high transfer rate may be more important for you.