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Hard drive speeds- 1TB, 2TB, 3TB

spdfreak

spdfreak

Senior member
I have 3 drives in my main system- and they all show differing read/write speeds. 1TB Samsung, 2TB Samsung and 3TB Seagate. The surprising thing is that the 3TB drive is by far the fastest. My question is whether I can use the 3TB as my main boot drive or is there some limitation. I'm a bit hesitant to use the 3TB drive for anything except back up since it would be a lot of data to lose if it died. Here are the numbers... I'd appreciate any expertise anyone has to offer.
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CrystalDiskMark 3.0.2 Shizuku Edition x64 (C) 2007-2012 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
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* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

Sequential Read : 121.482 MB/s
Sequential Write : 113.747 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 29.127 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 44.366 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.322 MB/s [ 78.6 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 0.772 MB/s [ 188.5 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 0.522 MB/s [ 127.4 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 0.771 MB/s [ 188.3 IOPS]

Test : 2000 MB [C: 78.0% (726.2/931.4 GB)] (x5)
Date : 2013/01/25 0:50:58
OS : Windows 7 Professional SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)




* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

Sequential Read : 123.762 MB/s
Sequential Write : 122.540 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 29.653 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 47.411 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.341 MB/s [ 83.2 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 0.848 MB/s [ 207.0 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 0.481 MB/s [ 117.5 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 0.887 MB/s [ 216.6 IOPS]

Test : 2000 MB [D: 54.2% (504.8/931.5 GB)] (x5)
Date : 2013/01/25 1:00:10
OS : Windows 7 Professional SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)



* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

Sequential Read : 183.269 MB/s
Sequential Write : 181.462 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 55.252 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 88.717 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.651 MB/s [ 159.0 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 1.374 MB/s [ 335.5 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 0.696 MB/s [ 169.9 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 1.393 MB/s [ 340.0 IOPS]

Test : 2000 MB [G: 34.4% (960.9/2794.4 GB)] (x5)
Date : 2013/01/25 1:07:46
OS : Windows 7 Professional SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)
 
The speed depends on how fast they spin, and the density of the platters.
While you could use the 3TB as OS, I wouldn't. Just get a SSD for the OS.
Keep 3TB for backups/storage, and another 3TB to keep backups of the backups. 🙂
 
All 7200 rpm drives... don't really know about the platter density but the performance difference is pretty big. I also have a WD 640 black drive I can use. I'll run a test on it tonight.
 
As an OS drive, it is not really the sequential throughput that matters. Your best case random 4k reads is 169.9 IOPS. This is the main reason to pay the much higher cost/gb on an SSD.

The 3t is the fastest, but there are problems with using >2T drives as a boot drive that probably aren't worth the trouble.

Personally I'd just go with the 1T for OS and some storage, the 2T for storage, and the 3T for a backup of everything. That's more or less how I was setup before getting an SSD.
 
Vinwiesel said:
As an OS drive, it is not really the sequential throughput that matters. Your best case random 4k reads is 169.9 IOPS. This is the main reason to pay the much higher cost/gb on an SSD.

The 3t is the fastest, but there are problems with using >2T drives as a boot drive that probably aren't worth the trouble.

Personally I'd just go with the 1T for OS and some storage, the 2T for storage, and the 3T for a backup of everything. That's more or less how I was setup before getting an SSD.
Click to expand...

That's how its set up now... mostly recorded TV shows and movies. I'll probably spring for a SSD soon and keep the 2TB for storage and the 3TB for backup.
 
booting large drives is silly. just throw in a small SSD that is bulletproof like an x25-V or x25-M (last forever). Xtreme has a x25-V well into the petabytes, slow as balls but man they are solid. I think we deployed about 40 of them with zero failures in the past few years. Now we moved to sammy 830's which are pretty tough.
 
If you aren’t going SSD then definitely try to use the 3TB one for the OS as it’s the fastest, by far. Setting up a single 3TB partition is silly though, so just use a small one at the edge of the platter for the OS, then put your data on the other(s).

Then use the 1TB + 2TB = 3TB drives to back it up.
 
NE has the Samsung 840 Pro 256GB drive on sale. Is this a good choice? With all the storage I have, how big a OS drive do I need?
 
Either way, backing up what you have is the most important thing. Using the HDD for storage will run the same risk of data loss just as if it was the OS drive. For speed, an SSD is the best option, but that doesn't make you "safe".
 
If you need more speed grab a 64gb SSD as your boot and use the rest as storage. I have 2x2TB and 2X3tb for backup and a pair of SSD's as boot.
 
MrX8503 said:
You could get away with 128GB SSD.
Click to expand...

If you need more speed grab a 64gb SSD as your boot and use the rest as storage.
Click to expand...

I would tend to vote for a 128GB as minimum unless you have a very minimal system install (including programs.) I'm just now transferring everything from my original 64GB SSD to a 256GB SSD because I ran out of room on my 64GB... it seemed like it would be big enough when I bought it... :whiste: ...and this is just on a W7 business system. There are also speed and wear benefits for the 128 vs 64GB drives.
 
Charlie98 said:
I would tend to vote for a 128GB as minimum unless you have a very minimal system install (including programs.) I'm just now transferring everything from my original 64GB SSD to a 256GB SSD because I ran out of room on my 64GB... it seemed like it would be big enough when I bought it... :whiste: ...and this is just on a W7 business system. There are also speed and wear benefits for the 128 vs 64GB drives.
Click to expand...

I'm with Charlie on that minimum size standard too.

The other thing that people don't keep in mind is.. sure you can use a smaller 64GB drive as your system drive(I've even used 30GB with a tweaked OS and full Adobe/Office suites).. but the fact is that the available free space is where you get the "speed stamina" from too.

This is because regardless of TRIM availability.. the firmware decides when and how much to clean those marked blocks as you're using it. With smaller drives having larger percentages of used/dirty flash compared to the same size install on a larger capacity drive.. it can cause more consistent slowdowns as it's forced to recover on-the-fly with more agressive GC patterns. And not all drives have very agressive GC patterns like the newest gen's do so that effect shouldn't be underestimated.
 
It will be windows 8 with all the normal stuff- PS, office, etc. The system is an AMD Phenom II 6 core, Gigabyte 970 board. I would need to enable something in the bios to use the SSD if I remember correctly? Any other tweaks I need to make?
 
This test isn't run in a way that makes a fair comparison. It might be "short-stroking" the drives. Spinning disks are fastest when they are accessing the outside of the platter, because more bits pass under the heads in a given period of time. Thus they are designed to start on the outside and work their way in.

The test uses most of the 1TB drive, a little more than half the 2 TB drive and only about a third of the 3TB drive. This may bias the test results in favor of the larger drive, or maybe not depending on which portion of the disk it actually accesses.

Furthermore, this is a strictly synthetic test. Newer higher density drives seem to have reached a wall in their ability to lock on to tracks and often their performance in real world tasks are scarcely better than the older drives they were designed to replace. The only way to tell for sure is to test them yourself. I doubt if you would be able to tell the difference between the feel of your OS on any of the three drives. Or maybe you would. You would notice the difference if you put your OS on an SSD.

I'm a little concerned that you mention that a reason not to put the OS on the 3TB drive is that it is a lot of data to lose. Well, whatever you put on the drive would constitute a lot of data to lose. You need a good backup strategy whatever.
 
I'm a little concerned that you mention that a reason not to put the OS on the 3TB drive is that it is a lot of data to lose. Well, whatever you put on the drive would constitute a lot of data to lose. You need a good backup strategy whatever.

Right now the 3TB drive is backup for the 1 and 2TB drives. Since it is mostly TV and movies recorded off OTA TV, it gets moved around a lot and most of it is also copied on the HTPC. So, one reason to have faster drives is because I'm moving 5-10GB files around pretty often.
 
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