Western Digital Blue 500gb SATA3 or Hitachi Deskstar 1TB SATA2

[Lazar_99]

Hi guys. I want to know which drive is better performance wise. The WD blue 500gb SATA3 or the hitachi deskstar 1TB SATA2. Both are 7200RPM and both are the same price but the WD is SATA3 (6.0 gbps), 16mb buffer and the hitachi is sata 2 (3.0gbps), 32mb buffer. Which one is better?

 

[overfocused]

The 1TB. In actuality neither could even max out a SATA 1 channel. Labeling them at 6Gbps capable is just referring to the interface itself. Either HDD will most likely get between 60-80 MB/sec sustained in optimal conditions.

 

[Lazar_99]

The 1TB. In actuality neither could even max out a SATA 1 channel. Labeling them at 6Gbps capable is just referring to the interface itself. Either HDD will most likely get between 60-80 MB/sec sustained in optimal conditions.

So you're saying that i will still have a bottleneck with either of these drives as i have with my sata 1 sagate barracuda 160gb?

 

[JeauxBleaux]

The actual throughput of the WD Blue is 126 MB/s max while the Hitachi is ~158 MB/s max (assuming 7200RPM)

Neither is going to come close to saturating a SATAII interface. The Hitachi will be the better performer due to the greater transfer rate and the larger buffer (32MB)

 

[overfocused]

So you're saying that i will still have a bottleneck with either of these drives as i have with my sata 1 sagate barracuda 160gb?

Yep! The 1TB will read/write faster since its newer and has larger capacity, but the HDD will still be your bottleneck. The 160GB probably only writes ~40MB/sec tops. in optimal conditions.

 

[Lazar_99]

Yep! The 1TB will read/write faster since its newer and has larger capacity, but the HDD will still be your bottleneck. The 160GB probably only writes ~40MB/sec tops. in optimal conditions.

Yes. I did a HDD test and it writes and reads just as you said. Its completely bottlenecking my computer and i can't play some new games even on low settings at a decent frame rate. But should i buy a seagate barracuda sata3 1TB or equivalent WD in hopes of getting rid of the bottleneck? their buffer is 64mb which is double the hitachi buffer

 

[zdbc13]

If you want to speed up your system get an SSD.

 

[Lazar_99]

If you want to speed up your system get an SSD.

that's totaly not worth it. i have a 160gb drive and a 120gb SSD costs like two sata3 1TB drives and i need more space. I can't believe i can't play far cry 3 with playable frame rates because of my hard drive -.-

 

[overfocused]

Yes. I did a HDD test and it writes and reads just as you said. Its completely bottlenecking my computer and i can't play some new games even on low settings at a decent frame rate. But should i buy a seagate barracuda sata3 1TB or equivalent WD in hopes of getting rid of the bottleneck? their buffer is 64mb which is double the hitachi buffer

Usually HDDs shouldn't be such a big factor once a game is loaded... especially at 40MB/sec, games don't run 24/7 needing that kind of throughput. I suspect that a big HDD will help but there also may be another culprit here too. Have you checked the fragmentation status of your HDD? Also, how much space is used? Both of these make a big impact on games that are constantly using the HDD. I do just fine with a 320GB HDD in my laptop playing games like Battlefield 3 and Planetside 2 since I keep the disk defragmented, and it also has ~%65 free space. Also those games don't use the HDD all too much once its loaded fully, but still, it doesn't take forever to load either. They DEFINITELY don't need 40MB/sec usage constantly so I wonder why that isn't enough for your machine.

I'm betting getting the 1TB HDD will relieve things but I'm not sure how much.

Also, the recommended RAM requirement for FC3 is 8GB, which makes me think that it might cause your HDD to use the page file. That could explain the obscenely low performance. It may be time for 16GB (if your board supports it) and disabling the page file completely.

 

[Lazar_99]

Usually HDDs shouldn't be such a big factor once a game is loaded... especially at 40MB/sec, games don't run 24/7 needing that kind of throughput. I suspect that a big HDD will help but there also may be another culprit here too. Have you checked the fragmentation status of your HDD? Also, how much space is used? Both of these make a big impact on games that are constantly using the HDD. I do just fine with a 320GB HDD in my laptop playing games like Battlefield 3 and Planetside 2 since I keep the disk defragmented, and it also has ~%65 free space. Also those games don't use the HDD all too much once its loaded fully, but still, it doesn't take forever to load either. They DEFINITELY don't need 40MB/sec usage constantly so I wonder why that isn't enough for your machine.

I'm betting getting the 1TB HDD will relieve things but I'm not sure how much.

Also, the recommended RAM requirement for FC3 is 8GB, which makes me think that it might cause your HDD to use the page file. That could explain the obscenely low performance. It may be time for 16GB (if your board supports it) and disabling the page file completely.

On C particion i have only 2 gigs free out of 30 and on D i have 40 gigs out of 120. The C particion is occupied only by windows 7 and is constantly changing between 1gb and 2gb free space probably because of updates. And you said its better to get more RAM. Well i did think and i ordered 8gigs of kingston hyperx (2x4gb) and my board supports up to 32 gigs of RAM so i should have 12gb when the RAM kit arrives

 

[overfocused]

Oh Lord, your partition configuration is most definitely the problem. Your OS only has 1-2GB of free space and almost no breathing room for temp files and page file operation. Your HDD is probably thrashing about whenever you do anything at all that involves using the C partition. Buying the 1TB HDD will most likely fix everything.

But in the meantime until you get a new HDD, shrink the D partition by 10GB and extend the C partition by 10GB using diskmgmt.msc. This should at least band-aid it until you get a the new HDD. And try to defragment since there's probably a hole burning in that 2GB section on your platter from all the frags it is taking, lol

 

[Lazar_99]

Oh Lord, your partition configuration is most definitely the problem. Your OS only has 1-2GB of free space and almost no breathing room for temp files and page file operation. Your HDD is probably thrashing about whenever you do anything at all that involves using the C partition. Buying the 1TB HDD will most likely fix everything.

But in the meantime until you get a new HDD, shrink the D partition by 10GB and extend the C partition by 10GB using diskmgmt.msc. This should at least band-aid it until you get a the new HDD. And try to defragment since there's probably a hole burning in that 2GB section on your platter from all the frags it is taking, lol

I can't. To increase the size of particion C i have to delete both particions and create new ones which means losing everything i have on my hard drive. Also while i was using windows 7 32bit i had at least 10 gigs free on C but because the 64bit takes more space i kinda found myself in a bad situation but this sata1 hard drive with a 8mb buffer really needs a replacement. Btw it even causes windows to boot up slowly and when it boots up, i have to wait about 2 mins in order for it to load up everything unless the whole PC will work slower than my old pentium 4 PC until it loads everything up

 

[overfocused]

No, there is an expand and shrink feature in diskmgmt

 

[Lazar_99]

No, there is an expand and shrink feature in diskmgmt

Wow... after 10 years of working on computers i never heard of that

 

[overfocused]

Wow... after 10 years of working on computers i never heard of that

Lol, nice. Its an extremely useful tool. It's been around since Vista. There are also 3rd party programs that work like Paragon that can do partition resizing as well.

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/resize-a-partition-for-free-in-windows-vista/


However the limit of flexibility depends on where the immovable files are on the platter.

 

[Lazar_99]

Lol, nice. Its an extremely useful tool. It's been around since Vista. There are also 3rd party programs that work like Paragon that can do partition resizing as well.

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/resize-a-partition-for-free-in-windows-vista/


However the limit of flexibility depends on where the immovable files are on the platter.

Nope. that doesn't work. If i shrink D it only lets me exdend particion D and i can't do anything about C.

 

[overfocused]

That stinks. Well then, I'd image this hdd to a 1TB drive as soon as you can and possibly rethink the partition scheme a little bit. If you want to keep the OS separate from the data portion I'd do something like 200GB/800GB or 250/750.

 

[zdbc13]

I agree 100%

 

[Lazar_99]

That stinks. Well then, I'd image this hdd to a 1TB drive as soon as you can and possibly rethink the partition scheme a little bit. If you want to keep the OS separate from the data portion I'd do something like 200GB/800GB or 250/750.

I had in mind 80 gigs since i will only be installing programs i use like sony vegas and the usual winrar ect... but not installing games on it. i wanted to split it to leave 500 on D, 80 on C and the rest will be for recording with fraps and everything related to video editing. and the current drive will have only 1 particion and it will be used for downloads, junk and my personal stuff. i thought about making the current drive for recording but its too slow and i would get better results with the new 1TB drive. Also note that it may say its 1TB but its actually less (some are 980 gigs or so and some like my friends samsung drive had 920 gigs and that's what i call a rip off lol)

 

[overfocused]

I had in mind 80 gigs since i will only be installing programs i use like sony vegas and the usual winrar ect... but not installing games on it. i wanted to split it to leave 500 on D, 80 on C and the rest will be for recording with fraps and everything related to video editing. and the current drive will have only 1 particion and it will be used for downloads, junk and my personal stuff. i thought about making the current drive for recording but its too slow and i would get better results with the new 1TB drive. Also note that it may say its 1TB but its actually less (some are 980 gigs or so and some like my friends samsung drive had 920 gigs and that's what i call a rip off lol)

Fraps is a pretty bad program when it comes to lossless codec efficiency. Its pretty morbid. The 160GB would be fast enough if that's all you used it for so it could sustain maximum sequential write speeds.

As for HDD size, its always less than the advertised amount after formatting. Advertisers use the base 10 version of 1GB, not the computer version, even after having been sued. Its misleading.

Quote from Wiki:


"Manipulation of measurement units and standards

Sellers may manipulate standards to mean something different than their widely understood meaning. One example is with personal computer hard drives. While a megabyte has always meant 220 (1,048,576) bytes in computer science, disk manufacturers began using the metric system (SI) prefix meaning of 106 (1,000,000) as their hardware standard. By stating the sizes of hard drives in hardware 'megabits' of 1,000,000 bytes instead of software 'megabytes' of 1,048,576 bytes, they overstate capacity by nearly 5%. With gigabytes instead of gigabits, the error increases to over 7% (1,073,741,824 instead of 1,000,000,000), and nearly 10% for the newer terabyte/terabit. Seagate Technology and Western Digital were sued in a class-action suit for this. Both companies agreed to settle the suit and reimburse customers in kind, yet they still continue to advertise this way.[5][6] To help combat this problem, a number of standards and trade organizations approved standards and recommendations in 2000 for a new set of binary prefixes, proposed earlier by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), that would refer unambiguously to powers of 1024. These new units are numerically identical to the established computer science convention, easing transition. Other operating systems either continue to use the older computer science convention (Microsoft Windows), or have switched to the new units (GNU/Linux), which are numerically identical to the older convention. Thus disk hardware on these systems still reports the actual capacity, which is lower than advertised..."


I think you could do just fine splitting the 1TB hdd into 2 partitions, 1 for OS, 1 for programs and data, and the 160GB with just 1 big partition for recording and scratch disk space.

 

[Lazar_99]

Fraps is a pretty bad program when it comes to lossless codec efficiency. Its pretty morbid. The 160GB would be fast enough if that's all you used it for so it could sustain maximum sequential write speeds.

As for HDD size, its always less than the advertised amount after formatting. Advertisers use the base 10 version of 1GB, not the computer version, even after having been sued. Its misleading.

Quote from Wiki:


"Manipulation of measurement units and standards

Sellers may manipulate standards to mean something different than their widely understood meaning. One example is with personal computer hard drives. While a megabyte has always meant 220 (1,048,576) bytes in computer science, disk manufacturers began using the metric system (SI) prefix meaning of 106 (1,000,000) as their hardware standard. By stating the sizes of hard drives in hardware 'megabits' of 1,000,000 bytes instead of software 'megabytes' of 1,048,576 bytes, they overstate capacity by nearly 5%. With gigabytes instead of gigabits, the error increases to over 7% (1,073,741,824 instead of 1,000,000,000), and nearly 10% for the newer terabyte/terabit. Seagate Technology and Western Digital were sued in a class-action suit for this. Both companies agreed to settle the suit and reimburse customers in kind, yet they still continue to advertise this way.[5][6] To help combat this problem, a number of standards and trade organizations approved standards and recommendations in 2000 for a new set of binary prefixes, proposed earlier by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), that would refer unambiguously to powers of 1024. These new units are numerically identical to the established computer science convention, easing transition. Other operating systems either continue to use the older computer science convention (Microsoft Windows), or have switched to the new units (GNU/Linux), which are numerically identical to the older convention. Thus disk hardware on these systems still reports the actual capacity, which is lower than advertised..."


I think you could do just fine splitting the 1TB hdd into 2 partitions, 1 for OS, 1 for programs and data, and the 160GB with just 1 big partition for recording and scratch disk space.

It may be a bad recording program but its a simple one. MSI afterburner is kinda annoying to set everything the way i like it and is causing a conflict with sapphire's OC ultility TriXX so i use fraps

 

[Lazar_99]

Best answer selected by Lazar_99.