Poor performance on stock hard drives (Benchmarks)

We bought a couple of M11x R2 systems for work, and I was pretty impressed so i bought one for myself. For the systems at work, we upgraded to Dell's 500 GB 7200 RPM drives. When i bought my system, I bought the system with the stock 160 GB and replaced it with a Hitachi Travelstar 500 GB 7200 RPM drive.

I wanted to test disk I/O after full disk encryption using Truecrypt. These benchmarks were taken using PC Wizard 2010 (the same people who make CPU-Z). I found some surprising results. Both laptops were defraged prior to benchmarking. All numbers are MB/s



Considering the pedigree and performance on these systems, i'm surprised Dell is shipping substandard drives. The moral of the story seems to be, buy the cheapest drive Dell offers and replace it yourself.

 

Yep, I too got the 160 5400 rpm drive (which is probably what yours came with, and updated to 60gb SSD)

Read speeds vary from 220-240

Bw, StevenX

 

Of course.

The truth is, most people don't know what make/model their hard drive is, and most people don't care. Only when you get computer enthusiasts do they pay attention to the hard drive. And only enthusiasts know that certain make/models are faster than others.

Any time they put generic specs like "500GB 7200rpm hard drive", you know it's going to be generic quality. If the performance was there, they would call out the make/model info like "Hitachi Travelstar 7k500 500GB 7200rpm hard drive".

They do this with CPUs, WiFi modules, Broadband cards, etc. But they don't with hard drives. Anytime you see generic specs, assume you're getting a generic part.

 

Very interesting... can anyone do a comparison between the SSD included with other SSD's? I got my M11X-R2 with an SSD and I hope they didn't use a substandard one =(

 

Mine came with the Seagate Momentous 500Mb (st9500420as) fitted, not too shabby as standard HDD go.

 

Which make/model of SSD did you get?

A big reason why they list generic specs is so that they can easily switch out suppliers. So we don't know the exact make/model of SSD in your specific laptop, unless you take a look at it.

 

I got a scorpio blue 160 GB, which was soon replaced with a momentus xt.

 

Dell ships with Samsung SSDs. Not the fastest, but certainly the best GB/$$ ratio.

 

I have the ST9500420AS 500GB 7200RPM as my standard HDD.

It does not match the posters HDD performance but it's slightly better than the Dell specs noted by poster.

Random read 33MB
Burst Rate 59.8MB
Max Read 100.7MB
Random Access 17.4ms

 

I don't have my m11x with me (using my m17x today) but here are some benchies I happen to have left in my Google Docs account.

m11x w/ 256gb SSD

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 3.0 x64 (C) 2007-2010 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : Crystal Dew World
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

Sequential Read : 194.921 MB/s
Sequential Write : 142.877 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 157.208 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 92.055 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 12.526 MB/s [ 3058.0 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 7.259 MB/s [ 1772.2 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 22.630 MB/s [ 5524.8 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 5.183 MB/s [ 1265.4 IOPS]

Test : 1000 MB [C: 29.2% (69.6/238.4 GB)] (x5)
Date : 2010/07/23 17:31:10
OS : Windows 7 Home Premium Edition [6.1 Build 7600] (x64)