Speed increase with new hard drive?

[duragezic]

I currently have a Seagate 7200.8 PATA 250GB and a WD 800JB 80GB. I reinstalled windows a while ago for the sole purpose of using the faster Seagate as my OS/apps/games drive. Though I can't be sure, it felt faster, but that probably means it was only a little bit faster I'd guess. The Seagate tests almost 10mb/s faster in sustained rate.

I seen the Seagate 7200.10 16mb cache, SATA 2/3gbps 320GB for just $95 in Hot Deals so it got me to wondering if this would provide a noticeable speed increase in OS use, apps, and game loading times. The benefits being its a 7200.10 w/ the new Perpd. tech I dont know anything about vs 7200.8 model, SATA (though I believe even if it was PATA it wouldn't be hampered by ATA133?), 16mb vs 8mb cache, and I'm not sure how the size of the hard drive and platters come into play with performance.

So, would it provide a quite noticeable increase in performance and snappyness, or would it be more like my older 7200rpm 8mb 80GB to 7200rpm 8mb 250GB move where the 250GB was only slighty quicker?

 

[PurdueRy]

doubtful. Most of the speed increase you got from the WD->Seagate was due to the capacity difference. Larger drives also tend to be faster. Now that this will not be the case...you probably won't notice any difference...and if you do its probably mostly your imagination

 

[GrammatonJP]

http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/GrammatonJP/750-nvidia.jpg

heres my 750 7200.10 vs my 250 maxtor maxline ii.. both sata..

sequential read is better.. burst about the same... just slightly faster...

 

[Madwand1]

I changed my OS drive from a Maxtor 100 GB DiamondMax 10 SATA to a Seagate 300 GB PATA 7200.10, and the Seagate benches a fair bit better in STR, but feels more sluggish. I don't have any benchmarks that will test at this level of subtlety, so you should take this report for what it is -- just a feeling.

I've heard that the firmware / electronics on the Maxtor (and WD's) might be better, so there might be something to this benching better in straight-ahead STR and not doing so well under more complex loads.

Could be nice to see some Maxtor firmware / electronics expertise going over to the Seagate drives..

http://forums.storagereview.net/index.php?showtopic=22660&st=25

 

[Madwand1]

Here's another review, and a topical quote from it for a specific test:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2803&p=8

The read performance of the WD3200KS is very impressive in these benchmarks while the write performance is average compared to the group. The Seagate 7200.10 320GB read performance is dismal compared to the other drives while its write performance was above average. This is interesting as its read performance in the anti-virus test was excellent. After further examination of the trace files we noticed the read requests in the anti-virus test consisted of mostly small block sizes in continual patterns compared to very large block sizes in irregular patterns in the file transfer test that hampered its performance. We are still looking into this as it seems to be an overall issue with the Seagate drives in general that indicates a poorly tuned firmware or cache design.

 

[Spikesoldier]

i have ran a fair share of HD's in the past, and finally replaced my multiple HDs with a 400gb 7200.9 seagate drive this past summer.

moving to a single drive solution felt sluggish moving from partition to partition, this is due to it is physically a single disk instead of writing to and fro different disks.

also I feel that the seagate was in fact a little sluggish compared to the maxtor and WD drives I used to have, probably placebo or the fact that im only running a single disk.

bottom line is dont buy the 7200.10 on the sole reason expecting a dramatic performance increase, it just doesn't happen like that. if the only reason you are buying is for speed, buy something that is designed to be a high performance solution so you wont get disappointed. get a 10K rpm raptor or some sort of SCSI solution if you are truly seeking high disk performance.

the 7200.10 is an incredible buy, but is not a performance leader in any regard except in its own class in which is narrowly edges the competition.

 

[vorgusa]

or implement a RAID 0 if you really want speed... you can get a second 7200.8 and put them in a RAID configuration if your motherboard supports it.. you will end up with 500 GBs running faster then a 7200.10

 

[vorgusa]

opps forgot that it will also be a cheaper way to do it... just make sure you do not try RAID 5 on a motherboard Raid controller