Question Nice performance boost after HDD upgrade..

[GunsMadeAmericaFree]

We've been using an old 2TB WD Green HDD in our system, not as a boot drive, but as a storage drive for Steam Games & other programs.

I've noticed it was a bit slow here and there, so when I recently saw a deal of a 4TB WD Blue drive for about $45, I got several of them.

Before taking the old HDD out, I ran a sort of test. I had 3 large folders on the old drive with expanded/ripped DVD info in them. I tried copying all of the data
over to a new folder on the same drive, and counted off 89 seconds before it got to 13% - basically 1/8 of the way done.

Then I cloned the drive to the new one, installed it, and ran the same test. I counted off 44 seconds before it got to the same 13% mark.
Quite a speed improvement for not much $!

 

[BonzaiDuck]

That's nice for you, and for using a spinner for a data drive.

I employ a strategy using slower, 5,400 rpm 2.5" drives -- in my midtower desktop. They are at the bottom of my "storage pyramid".

I use PrimoCache to cache the spinners to a 250GB NVME stick, and -- if I want -- I can have two-tiered caching by further caching the spinners to part of my 64GB RAM. So I don't worry for not having 7,200 rpm spinners with faster access and throughput. If I'm reading a media file like a movie, it doesn't have to be faster than any 2.5" spinner could give me.

One of the spinners is a Macrium backup disk. What else would I choose for such a purpose? And of course -- it needn't be cached at all.