• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

hard drive performance

Y

yowen

Gawd
Joined
May 20, 2011
Messages
664
So Have a 2.5" Hitachi laptop drive for my desktop right now, it's 500gb, 7200 rpm. It is a 7K500.

Are the performance levels of this comparable to a recent desktop model?

the reason this is on my desktop is that I bought just before HD prices skyrocketed, so instead of putting it in my laptop I put in my new desktop. But I am just curious if I should be on the lookout as prices come down (hopefully).

What I am actually thinking is that I should probably get an SSD? Because switching from one mechanical drive to the other probably doesn't make a big difference at all...
 
I read another member's post saying 2.5" laptop HDD really aren't meant to be run like 3.5"s. You might want to check the Storage forum to double check.

You should see a huge difference going to a SSD.
 
I've benchmarked a lot of hard drives and generally speaking, most laptop 2.5" 7200rpm 320gb and 500gb drives I benchmark had results (both in access time and data transfer) closer to desktop 3.5" 5400rpm drives (WD green, Seagate 5900rpm) than they do to desktop 3.5" 7200rpm drives.

To answer your question on your 2.5" Hitachi laptop, I would say no, it is not comparable to a recent desktop model which are typically a single platter and perform a nice step up from older generation 2 or 3 platter drives.

However, like ninjaturtle mentioned, the difference between an SSD and any mechanical drive is huge. I highly recommend an SSD for anyone who spends a fair amount of time on their computer and does much more than surf and answer email.
 
Something to consider with the 7200 RPM laptop drives, they tend to burn through the battery quicker.

I had a 7200 RPM drive in my laptop, then swapped in a SSD. On average, the battery time shows about 2 hours longer than with the 7200 RPM drive.
 
tonyb said:
Something to consider with the 7200 RPM laptop drives, they tend to burn through the battery quicker.

I had a 7200 RPM drive in my laptop, then swapped in a SSD. On average, the battery time shows about 2 hours longer than with the 7200 RPM drive.
Click to expand...

If you really gained 2 hours of battery life by just swapping out a HDD for a SSD on a laptop, you had something else going on (power management problems, etc.) that coincidentally changed.
 
mwroobel said:
If you really gained 2 hours of battery life by just swapping out a HDD for a SSD on a laptop, you had something else going on (power management problems, etc.) that coincidentally changed.
Click to expand...

Or your your hard drive was not spinning down when not in use.


Edit: I do not think even that would do it since laptop drives are only like 2W.
 
The faster part of an hard drive (which is the "beginning" of it) is the outer part of the platters. That outer part is "missing" when you're comparing a 2,5" to a 3,5" drive.
 
That graph Looks really slow to me. I would expect the numbers to be around double that if you ran 3.5 inch drives from 2011. Meaning ones with 666 GB or greater platters. Although the power usage would double as well.

Edit: Looks like you are benching a single disk. That is reasonable for a laptop drive. A top end desktop drive (for example hitachi 7k3000) would add about 50MB/s to the graph from beginning to end..
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top