53.3 MB/sec transfer rate?

On my Fujitsu MHY2250BH that's what I get using HDDtune. What's the deal? I see in some of these benchmarks some HDD's hitting the 90's.

 

It depends on the drive. If it's a slow 4200RPM drive it's obvious that it's going to read/write slower. Also, as capacity increases (if the number of platters remains the same) the speed increases because of data density (having to move less distance to read/write the same amount of data).

 

Sounds about right for 250gb 5400rpm drive.

Were you running any programs in the background that could be taxing HD resources?

You will need a SSD or 7200rpm drive to reach near 90mb/s

 

It's only about a year old. It's a 250 Gig 5400 RPM drive with an 8 meg cache. Hmmm, didn't realize how much HDD's have evolved over the years. If I replaced this with a drive that hits 90 MB/sec how much of a speed boost would my system recieve?

 

to get good results run hd tune while nothing is running on the drive .....

for a 5400rpm thats good

what your seeing is 7200 rpm drive in raid possibly

 

There will be a noticeable difference in your boot time and when you're transferring large files.

 

btw your sig says 5200rpm.

If you replaced it with a faster drive, everything will load and save much faster. From booting up windows to opening programs,etc. It mainly depends on how much the software relies on the HD.

 

my 7200 rpm booted in like 20-25 sec cant remeber ...

go SSD and boot in 7 sec lol

 

i get about 92mbps on my 5400 rpm raid0.

 

7200RPM 2.5" drives won't hit 90MB/s sustained or average. They might hit it at max. Besides, 50MB/s is pretty good for a 5400RPM drive as it is. But SSDs are the way to go for fast sustained.

 

I get around 70MB/s transfer rate on 160GB 5400RPM WD scorpio blue. Xp boots in 15-20 seconds. Right now, intel atom cpu is the limiting factor for the boot speed. If I had faster CPU, i can cut down the boot down by at least 5-10 seconds.

 

My 320GB WD3200BEVT (should be same family as yours), only hits 50-55MB/s on the 100MB sequential CrystalDiskMark test. Which benchmark are you using?

 

I'm using hdtune.

 

See this thread for where the 5400rpm HDDs have reached on the performance curve. If the data density on the platters is increased then the transfer rates also go up (but have not doubled - I think the extra data density is a combination of more data per track and more tracks).

You can compare the HDD performance at Tom's Hardware (but they haven't yet tested all the newer HDDs).

John

 

I redid the benchmark again. The max throughtput is 68.1MB/s or ~70MB/s like I've said earlier.

 

Max is different than sustained. The curve for HDDs drop as you should see in HDTune. You won't get that transfer rate in real life.

 

Max on this HDD is 53.3 MB/sec the average which I also believe is the same as sustained is about 33 MB/sec.

 

Try CrystalDiskMark?

 

33 MB/sec is pretty bad. I would upgrade it. Also just because your laptop is only a year old doesn't mean the drive is only a year old. That harddrive model could have been in production much earlier.

 

go with an SSD that doesn't use jmicron if you really wanna see how storage affects your usage...

 

I actually do get those transfer rate in real life. All my data goes on the slower parts of the drive and all the most used files goes to the beginning of the drive where it's the fastest. The most commonly used files are all packed in about 5GB area on the edge of the disk thus lowering the access time and make the most out of the hdd.

Crystal Disk mark has 1 major flaw in the bench mark, is that it doesn't reflect the actual performance. The performance varies depending on where the data is read or written to.

BTW.. max sequential read/write is about 60MB/s on my 160GB 5400RPM WD scorpio blue with crystal disk mark benchmark tool. Since the data are clearly not written to the edge of the disk where all my most frequently used files and the OS is, thus the numbers will be lower. If i had ran the benchmark on an empty hdd, the drive can probably get about 70MB/s on the 100MB test.

 

Hmmm, maybe I'll use some of my tax return then to pick up the 320 gig Seagate drive that I have heard great things about! On the 1640 is there anyway to change the HDD performance setting to the highest? On the M1530 there was an acoustics management setting in the BIOS, on this computer there isn't. I have the write caching and that stuff on from the device manager properties area but was wondering if I could change it's acoustics to performance.

 

You can change the accustic settings in the HDD's firmware.

 

How do I access the HDD's firmware?

 

Depending on which brand it is, you need different programs.

Hitachi: http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm
Samsung: http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/support/utilities/ES_Tool.html

The manufacture's website usually have the untility to change the AAM settings.

Some articles for HDDSs.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/short-stroking-hdd,2157.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/terabyte-hitachi-acoustic,2084.html

 

Mine is a Fujitsu, as I didn't see this brand mentioned anywhere and cannot find any useful programs on the fujitsu website I'm going to assume that I'm SOL and that it's a BIOS only thing?

 

Does your hard drive sort more commonly used files through defrag? My hard drive transfers are pretty much always in line with the average speeds for large file transfers as opposed to the max transfer rate of HDTune. In my experience, I think it's pretty unrealistic to use max speed since most users will not have an empty drive. Out of my 300GB, I typically have 50-150GB free.

 

Diskeeper constantly defrag with idle system sources and "intelligently" places commonly used file to the beginning of the drive.

Out of 500GB + 250GB (2 hdds), I currently have about 15GB left in earch and yet Vista 64bit still runs without any lag. Throughtput for commonly used file is almost always above 100MB/s read even with a full drive (Hitachi 500GB 7K500).
On my netbook, I have about 20GB of free space left for the 160GB HDD. Common files usually have read throughtput over 60MB/s. Eboostr also makes a lot of difference in terms of responsiveness. With photoshop, after effects, internet explorer, Word 2007, Outlook 2007, foobar 2000, ...etc open all at once, it doesn't even lag.

For large transfers (above 5GB), the speed is always in my case limited either by the network or usb. Moving data on same the local drive is very fast because only the partition table is changed thus getting speed around 5-10GB/second.

 

I'll take a look at those programs, thanks.

 

You sir have just turned me onto TWO new programs!