WD Green 2TB "IntelliPower" drive faster than Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200 RPM?

[jack6128]

I used DiskBench to test the transfer speeds of the two drives, a WD Green Desktop, model WD20EARX and a Seagate Barracuda, model ST2000DM001 on an XP machine with an Asus P5Q MB, Core2 Quad processor and 2GB of RAM with the following results.


7.05 GB file transfer:
WD to WD - 38.617 MB/s
Seagate to Seagate - 35.497 MB/s

0.705 GB file transfer:
WD to WD - 43.268 MB/s
Seagate to Seagate - 32.956 MB/s


From what I can gather, the WD Green drive rotates at 5405 rpm and the Seagate at 7200 rpm. The WD drive is designed for storage, not speed, but in these benchmarks it is faster than the Seagate.

I guess I have two questions:

1. Are these transfer speeds typical of drives of this sort, SATA3 drives on and SATA2 MB?
2. Why is the Seagate 7200 rpm drive so much slower than the WD "IntelliPower" 5405 rpm drive?

 

[trekzone]

Benchmarking actually also varies in some conditions and in each system you used... Try reading this >>BENCHMARKS<<

 

[jack6128]

Thanks, tz, very useful site in my case! What do you think of the transfer speeds I posted:

7.05 GB file transfer:
WD to WD - 38.617 MB/s
Seagate to Seagate - 35.497 MB/s

0.705 GB file transfer:
WD to WD - 43.268 MB/s
Seagate to Seagate - 32.956 MB/s

Do these seem about right? The benchmarks I get in ATTO and CrystalDiskMark seem to be in line with what these drives should be capable of, but when trying to transfer a 7GB file and a .7GB file with DiskBench, which I assume should be sequential given the amount of free space on the defragged drives, I get transfer rates around 40MB/sec. Is this about right, IYO?

When transferring between drives I get this:

7.05 GB file transfer:
WD to Seagate - 56.641 MB/s
Seagate to WD - 59.783 MB/s

0.705 GB file transfer:
WD to Seagate - 155.268 MB/s
Seagate to WD - 94.528 MB/s

 

[trekzone]

Well, seems the numbers you get are quiet acceptable considering the amount of RAM you have in your system. IMO

 

[jack6128]

Thanks, tz, that's all I need to know! I was thrown off balance by the sequential read and write speeds as measured by Atto and CrystalDiskMark, which approached 200MB/sec for the Seagate. But I suspect that is different than the speed at which a large file can be transferred from one part of a disk to another, which involves reading from and writing to the disk and RAM.