5400RPM HDD writing at 5 - 6 mbps, is this normal?

[Trewyy]

Hey,

Here's the situation. I have two partitions, D and C. I'm copying my 150GB Steam library from Partition D to Partition C, and it is taking an awful long time. I have a 1TB 5400RPM Seagate HDD and it is moving files between the partitions at about 5 - 6 mbps.

What I want to know is if these speeds should be expected.

My setup:
i5 2500k
GTX 460
1TB 5400RPM
4GB RAM
550 Watt PSU

Thanks ahead of time!
Robert

 

[Trewyy]

Shameless bump. Anyone want to pitch in?

 

[eidol]

I get ~15MBps for sequential reads off my Seagate 5400.

What you're doing appears to be mixing up reads and writes on the same device, I'm not sure how that would affect throughput.

 

[blazorthon]

That seems normal considering what you are doing. Huge partition to partition copies usually have very poor performance on hard drives because you're reading and writing from different areas on the same disks. A good SSD could run several hundred times faster for that sort of job.

 

[rdc85]

that normal with, 5400rpm disk....

It also my biggest regret for putting 5400 disk on the my lappy...

 

[blazorthon]

that normal with, 5400rpm disk....

It also my biggest regret for putting 5400 disk on the my lappy...

Being a 5.4K RPM drive doesn't automatically make it a slow drive. There are many, many more factors than jsut spindle speed that determine performance and if spindle speed was all that mattered, then the 7.2K RPM drives would still only be about 20% faster anyway.

 

[mavroxur]

That's way slow for a modern 5400 RPM drive.

 

[blazorthon]

That's way slow for a modern 5400 RPM drive.

I don't think that it's slow considering what OP is doing. Mixing read/write operations on different sections of the hard drive always have horrible performance because that is the worst-case realistic scenario for a hard drive.

 

[Traciatim]

Hey,

Here's the situation. I have two partitions, D and C. I'm copying my 150GB Steam library from Partition D to Partition C, and it is taking an awful long time. I have a 1TB 5400RPM Seagate HDD and it is moving files between the partitions at about 5 - 6 mbps.

What I want to know is if these speeds should be expected.

My setup:
i5 2500k
GTX 460
1TB 5400RPM
4GB RAM
550 Watt PSU

Thanks ahead of time!
Robert

Yes, that's pretty normal. What you are doing is essentially the worst case scenario that a drive can possibly have happen. Every single read and write operation is doing essentially full seeks across the drive taking up huge amounts of time. This is vastly different than most benchmarks where a drive is tested for burst sequential reads and writes.

Take a look at the benchmark over at http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2012-mobile-hdd-charts/-12-PCMark-7,2995.html which shows the MB/s throughput moving images around a drive. The very fastest 5400RPM drive in that chart is getting 6.64MB/s (and that's probably not creating huge seek swings like partitions would create).

 

[Trewyy]

Thank you to everyone for your input!

I ended up getting, at max, about 8mbps. I can always rely on the Toms Hardware readers for help

Lets say I was doing the same operation on a modern SSD - can anyone tell me what kind of speed I might get?

Robert

 

[blazorthon]

Like I said, it'd be able to run at several hundred MB/s. It'd be an absolutely huge improvement for that sort of operation. Something such as a Vertex 4, Plextor M5S, or such would be excellent at a reasonable price.

 

[Traciatim]

Thank you to everyone for your input!

I ended up getting, at max, about 8mbps. I can always rely on the Toms Hardware readers for help

Lets say I was doing the same operation on a modern SSD - can anyone tell me what kind of speed I might get?

Robert

I guess a better question would be why would you ever need to partition an SSD? Would you be copying data from an SSD to spinning disk, two SSD's, two partitions on the same SSD?

All of these will impact performance in different ways. However, random transactions are really where SSD's shine and show off their advantages and will not really slow down like a spinning disk would . . . at least not in any way that you would care or really notice. What you gain in speed you sacrifice in capacity. That's why many people use an SSD as a boot/program drive and a spinning disk for storage.

 

[fzabkar]

I would eliminate all the variables by starting with a read benchmark of the subject drive, eg HD Tune.