When a 10,000 RPM drive is not the best

[dood]

Out of curiousity, I decided to take a peek at how my different hard drives in my system compare, speed-wise. This is strictly a read test, as I do not have the full version of HD-Tune to be able to do a write test.

What I found was a little surprising to me, in that my 10,000 RPM drive, which I figured would be best for my primary, was actually outperformed by a vanilla Seagate 80gb drive.

On doing some research, I found that the Western Digital WD360 was the first 10k RPM drive WD released in SATA150. And there's the biggest difference... the 10k drive is 150, and the 80gb is 3.0.

Numbers:

10K WD drive
Min- 25MB/Sec
Max- 55MB/Sec
Avg- 45.9MB/Sec

Access- 9.5ms
Burst- 88MB/Sec
CPU- 18.8%

Seagate 80gb 7.2k drive
Min- 32.5MB/Sec
Max- 70.2MB/Sec
Avg- 57.5MB/Sec

Access- 14.3ms
Burst- 105.6MB/Sec
CPU- 18.2%

Now, obviously the access time on the 10k drive is much higher due to it's higher spindle speed. However, I was suprised to find that the Seagate beat it everywhere else!

[Wizard]

Re: When a 10,000 RPM drive is not the best

What's the size of this 10K WD?

Cheers, Wizard

[dood]

Re: When a 10,000 RPM drive is not the best

It's a 36.7gb drive. It's a WD360GD-00FNA0 Raptor drive. Made May 18th, 2004

The Seagate drive is a ST3808110AS

[370forlife]

Re: When a 10,000 RPM drive is not the best

Compare a WD 10K sata 1.5 to a WD 7.2K sata 3.0:

My 320gb WD 7200rpm sata 3.0:

min: 33.6MB/s
max: 76.5MB/s
Avg: 59.9MB/s

Access time: 12.3ms
Burst rate: 120.1MB/s

[Wizard]

Re: When a 10,000 RPM drive is not the best

This 36GB raptor is very old now and has low transfer speed due to lower density platters. This is the reason the 1 platter seagate 80GB is stomping on the 1 platter raptor, interface speed effects some.

Now, if you compare with a VelociRaptor 150 or 300GB version to a 320GB one platter 7200, then you will see some difference but cost is 1 buck per 1GB. costly.

Go with typical 32MB SATA 300 one platter 320GB or larger, costs around 60 or so these days, even for a Hitachi.

Cheers, Wizard

[dood]

Re: When a 10,000 RPM drive is not the best

Yeah, I understand the differences now that I've read up on the old WD drive. I guess my point just was that when I originally installed it in my system, I assumed 10k RPMs would be better than anything else for a primary drive. Not so... I'm now even happier with the 80gb drive as my primary

[gdement]

Re: When a 10,000 RPM drive is not the best

Biggest downside IMO with 10k drives is that they definitely need a fan to run safely. I prefer doing that even with 7200rpm but at 10k it's a more serious issue.

[dood]

Re: When a 10,000 RPM drive is not the best

Actually, according to SMART (and the highly scientific finger-tip test), the 10k RPM drive was the coolest running out of all three. Probably because my drive bays go like this:

200gb maxtor
Floppy
250gb seagate
empty
10k rpm drive
open space to the bottom of the case

So, there's some airspace above it, and an 80mm case fan a little ways below it. But I've never had a fan blowing directly on it.

[Per Hansson]

Re: When a 10,000 RPM drive is not the best

Well, STR programs don't really show very much about how a harddrive performs
Instead look at the Storagereview performance database, check loading performance for really hughe games like World of Warcraft and Far Cry;

http://www.storagereview.com
But yea, that old Raptor isn't worth much today, which also clearly shows in the benchmarks
The latest Raptor is amazingly almost 2 times as quick as the old Raptor in these real world tests!

[willawake]

Re: When a 10,000 RPM drive is not the best

Seagate 7200.11 1tb

Min- 52.5MB/Sec
Max- 108.9MB/Sec
Avg- 84.1MB/Sec

Access- 13ms
Burst- 61.8MB/Sec
CPU- 0.9%

hey why my burst sucks?

[Harvey]

Re: When a 10,000 RPM drive is not the best

It shows how much of a difference areal density makes:


HD Tune: Hitachi HDS721616PLA (A 'fast' 160GB drive when it was new, ~3 years ago)

Transfer Rate Minimum : 32.1 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 74.2 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 56.1 MB/sec
Access Time : 16.0 ms
Burst Rate : 156.2 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 2.7%

-----

HD Tune: Hitachi HDP725050GLA (A 'slow' 500GB media storage/quiet drive)

Transfer Rate Minimum : 47.2 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 91.8 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 75.1 MB/sec
Access Time : 18.6 ms
Burst Rate : 176.7 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 3.0%

- the 500GB cost less than half the [actual] price of the 160GB

[zandrax]

Re: When a 10,000 RPM drive is not the best

hey why my burst sucks?

Early Seagate 7200.11 drives with 32 MB of cache had a lot of trouble with cache: first firmwares seemed to disable it or, at least, motherboards were unable to detect it and reported 0 MB, decimating transfert rate. Updating the firmware should solve the issue.

Zandrax