What is the access speed of my disk drive?

I have an XPS 1530 with a 500G 5400 RPM Samsung Hard Drive. Under Device Manager, it says WDC WD5000BEVT-75ZAT0 (whatever that means). I don't know the cache size (where can I find that)? Is there a way to know what the access speed is of the disk drive?

The reason I want to know is that I have an external drive hooked up to my wireless router & when I write to the external drive, it seems very slow. I want to figure out where the bottleneck is. Thus, I want to know the access speed of the drive in my laptop.

I will be writing a couple of hundred GB's at a time when I'm doing a backup. Yes, I have that much data (pictures, videos, etc.) Thanks everyone.

 

That's going to take forever over wireless. The bottleneck isn't your internal 500GB drive. Earlier in the week I cloned 700GB from one SATA drive to another and it took four hours.

My suggestion is to connect the external drive directly to your laptop to do the transfer.

 

I don't mind if it takes 8 hours (overnight). I heard the wireless is not the bottleneck but rather it's the disk drive. But I need data to know if that's correct or not. The first step is determining the access speed of my internal hard drive.

 

That is incorrect, wireless IS the bottleneck. 802.11g is 54Mbps. 54 MegaBITS per second, not megabytes. 54Mbps is 6.75 megabytes per second. Even if you have wireless-N it will not be faster than disk access to/from an internal hard drive.

The 320GB 7200RPM hard drive in my Latitude D630 gets about 65 megabytes per second. 10 times faster than the theoretical max speed of 802.11g, which you would never see anyways. My 128GB SSD reads 220MB/s and writes 140MB/s. Install HDTune or HDTach and it will tell you your disk speed.

My home network is entirely gigabit so transfers are much faster than over wireless.

 

To answer the OP's original question, see here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...5000bevt-500gb-2-5-hdd-review-benchmarks.html

The access time of your drive is about 12ms, but what you're thinking of is the throughput which is about 60MB/s on average. As mentioned, the bottleneck is no doubt your wireless infrastructure, which, if G, is about 2MB/s, and if N, is about two or three times that.

If you want to move files over a network, you had better get a gigabit infrastructure like ZippoMan's.

 

Thanks for the link. Lots of great numbers there. My invoice says I have a Samsung drive, but since it says WDC, does that mean it's Western Digital? Thanks for letting me know I really wanted "throughput". Do you say it's about 60 MB/s.

I'm using 802.11n. When I'm copied some files, I looked at Network & Sharing Center & it showed an average wireless network speed of about 15 MB/sec. Is this an accurate measurement? It's much larger than your number.

I used Windows explorer & did a Cut & Paste. In the info window, it gives the speed of the transfer & it showed 2 MB/s. Much slower than the HDD & the wireless. Is this an accurate measurement? If yes, why is it so much slower than my wireless?

Ethernet would be faster but then I'd have to string a cable from the back office into the living room which would be a pain.

 

15MB/s is probably the theoretical limit of your 802.11 n configuration... 2MB/s is probably what you're actually getting. That does seem a little slow, but depending on how far you are from your access point, if you've got walls between you and it, etc, it's probably right.

 

For 802.11n, the theoretical speed is 37 MB/sec. I read that what you actually get is 16 MB/sec. My computer shows about 15 MB/sec so that seems to fit. My computer is about 20 feet from the router with no walls in between.

So why does the copy, using wireless, occur at only 2 MB/sec.

Also tried the copy with the Ethernet cable (wireless off) & got a transfer rate of 5 MB/sec. About twice as fast as wireless, but still seems pretty slow.

My source drive has a read transfer rate of 60 MB/sec & my destination drive has a write transfer rate of 13 MB/sec. Why is the copy so slow?

 

A lot is just overhead.

 

That's a lot of overhead. So you're saying my Ethernet rate of 5 MB/sec is about as good as I can do with the hardware I have?