• 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.

HDD performances

D

digifred

n00b
Joined
Jul 8, 2010
Messages
50
I would like to know if the performances of HDDs have significantly improved in the last 3 years to make it worthwhile changing an HD unit in a system upgrade. I'm talking about 7200 rpm disks and not SSD ones. I currently have a WD Caviar SE16. I'll be upgrading for the rest the processor (AMD 4400+ to X3 720) and gpu and add some ram. What do you think? Thanks.
 
digifred said:
I would like to know if the performances of HDDs have significantly improved in the last 3 years to make it worthwhile changing an HD unit in a system upgrade. I'm talking about 7200 rpm disks and not SSD ones. I currently have a WD Caviar SE16. I'll be upgrading for the rest the processor (AMD 4400+ to X3 720) and gpu and add some ram. What do you think? Thanks.
Click to expand...

The maximum sequential (physical/sustainable) transfer speed of today's hard drives is about double what your current Western Digital Caviar SE16 drive could achieve -- 125 to 150 MB/s versus about 65 MB/s. However, random access speed has not changed much, staying basically in the 13 to 15 ms range.
 
Thanks for the links, these units seem affordable for an upgrade.

Will I need SATA300 to take advantage of high sequential speeds? My system uses SATA150 currently.
 
digifred said:
Thanks for the links, these units seem affordable for an upgrade.

Will I need SATA300 to take advantage of high sequential speeds? My system uses SATA150 currently.
Click to expand...

On the outer tracks (where the sequential transfer speed is fastest), those Samsung hard drives just barely surpass the maximum practical bandwidth of your system's SATA I interface.
 
digifred said:
Thanks for the links, these units seem affordable for an upgrade.

Will I need SATA300 to take advantage of high sequential speeds? My system uses SATA150 currently.
Click to expand...

Based on that.. DO NOT GET A SAMSUNG.. Unless your up for a headache.. I Believe Samsung to make the best drives currently, But you cant change the drives to SATA 150 mods on the drive themselves like most (no jumpers on sammy's). There is no Dip Switch, You have to use a boot disk to do it & often it will give problems detecting the drives correctly until its done.

I have dont it & it works, Just basically have to keep rebooting until its recognized & boot from the disk with Samsung utilities. Then your home free.

As far as the controller goes, I believe you will need to have sata 300 before you get the FULL performance out of modern mechanical drives, But with the 150 your still going to be way faster then you are now & the controller shouldn't prove to be too much of a bottleneck.
 
I'm very happy with my F3s, very quick and no problems. RAID0 for four months or so, strictly for gaming.

SATA 300 though.

-HD
 
^^ +1. I've also been using 2 Spinpoints in RAID 0. A good 80% or so increase in performance (HDTach and HDTune benchmarks), and no issues of losing data etc. Of course, I still keep all important documents in my dropbox and do a nightly backup of media to an external drive.
 
Yea dont get me wrong there is nothing wrong with them.. My server is full of them & I jsut ordered a samsung mp4 for my desktop.. I Was just pointing out a major hassle that I had the misfortune of finding out.. As soon as I got the damn setting changed they performed flawlessly..
 
digifred said:
I would like to know if the performances of HDDs have significantly improved in the last 3 years to make it worthwhile changing an HD unit in a system upgrade. I'm talking about 7200 rpm disks and not SSD ones. I currently have a WD Caviar SE16. I'll be upgrading for the rest the processor (AMD 4400+ to X3 720) and gpu and add some ram. What do you think? Thanks.
Click to expand...

Personally, I have not upgraded to SSDs yeat and I do not plan on doing so anytime soon.

I do understand they perform better than mechanical drives, but I do not think the long-term reliability is quite there yet...though they are making progress...

I prefer striping out the best part of my mechanical drives and using Matrix RAID 0 to get the performance while using the RAID 5 function on the remainder of the drive

Here are some of the bench results

http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/5353/ich10rmatrixraid0.png
http://img265.imageshack.us/img265/4531/attoresultsmatrixraid0.png
http://img188.imageshack.us/img188/4712/hdtachraid0750gb.png
http://img196.imageshack.us/img196/5997/hdtune750gbraid0.png

You can see that the performance of Matrix RAID is pretty nice, especially when you slice out the best part of your drive and put that portion in RAID0 (and use the remainder in RAID5 for reliability
 
Last edited:
I'd recommend a WD Caviar Black SATA3 model. In fact, if you have the capability to use Matrix RAID, I recommend 4 or 6 of those drives with the fastest part sliced out for RAID0 and the rest in RAID5
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top