Notebook hard disc weakest component

holyfudgestickles.. awesome word

and in the words of morpheus: welcome to the real world

or something like that?

 

I know. Jim Carrey uses it all the time.

Example: you have 2 HD in your machine. A ssd and an "oldskool" variant like mine.
Say you want to transfer files between them.. will it suck?

 

no. why should it?
it would be as fast as the slower part. reading from one, writing to the other. check the read speed of the source, the write speed of the target, and then take the min value of the two.

then you know the speed.

 

It's an internal 3.5-inch Seagate SATA2-300 160GB drive. I don't exactly know why. With the 5400RPM drive in there, the system was stuttering. Now I personally never had 1st gen JMicron controller based SSD, but it felt like they were sports cars in comparison. The system would show that loading "ring" with nearly everything I do, and occasionally it would become unresponsive.

I put the original drive back in, and voila, no more problems. Keep in mind that the 5400RPM was in its own degraded state which was extremely slow, but I'd never thought it would affect my whole system.

 

Earlier I said WEI HDD score isn't a very acurate benchmark and not a good indication of real life performance. Here's an example:

System: Acer 1810tz
Harddrives: WD1600bevt, Seagate 5400.6

WEI HDD score: WD 5.4 Seagate 5.8

job: duplicate 3.59GB folder, 23521 files.

Run1 WD: 301 sec Seagate 353 sec percentage slower: 17%
Run2 WD: 302 sec Seagate 351 sec percentage slower: 16%

 

what are the boot times of each? how long do app starts take?

maybe it is in general more performant for random accesses, or something? no clue.

it does measure average random access latency, and weights this into the benchmark. but i don't know it's inner workings exactly.

 

according to hdtune searches on google, wd has up to 65MB/s, seagate has up to 78MB/s btw..

so, it should be faster

 

The WD boots in 43 sec, the Seagate in 51.

I think WEI goes mainly by read transferrates. But the WD has better acces times and I/O, that's why it does almost everything faster than the Seagate.

Same thing goes for WD3200BEKT vs. Seagate 7200.3. In every synthetic benchmark the Seagate wins, while in real life the WD wins everything. The synthetic results can be found on Tomshardware and the real life tests on Techreport.

 

well, obviously all syntetic benchmarks are then just as stupid as WEI which, actually, puts the WEI high on top of my list of favourite syntetic benchmarks

other than that, who cares about hdd speeds.. that's like caring which turtle is faster while you could get a cheetah

 

Other synthetic benchmarks like HDtune give more information than WEI, like acces times or IOPS.

Of course Microsoft has reasons to keep WEI simple, I can understand that. But as a benchmark it's very limited. That was my point.

I agree that the differences between these HDDs are small and may seem irrelevant when compared to fast SSDs.

 

well, it's a simple benchmark, as it's a one-number benchmark.. so what do you expect? it measures more (and uses that detailed info) but it should just help for a quick judgement about the system.

and, yeah, i looked at both disks, and from my quick look at hdtune, i would still take the one with the higher WEI index, as it looks better in hdtune, too.

and yes, they are both absolute crap, compared to any ssd, so i would never touch any of those anyways

 

I'd rather take the hard drive that is faster in real life.

Each to his own I guess.

PS. it only looks better in HDTune if you ignore acces times.

 

hm seagate shows better access times, too...

as i said, from some random googled hdtune screenshots, the seagate is better overall. and WEI reports the same. => WEI is as good as hdtune in my eyes. which should be quite good, then..

that your experience is different than hdtunes and weis results is another issue (and not an issue with you, per se. real world might be different than the benches.. no clue why, but it can)

 

Just post screenshots both of you that would allow anybody to see what your conclusions are based on

 

random wd



random seagate



*FIGHT*

 

because Microsoft makes hard drives?

 

i'll let the numbers speak for themselves.

 

he's not talking about microsoft. he talks about micro$oft...

 

You guys are looking at different HDDs

Dave: 320GB WD vs. 250GB SG
Phil: 160GB WD vs. 320GB SG

 

haha okay

 

I was talking about the hard drives I benchmarked today.

The Seagate had a WEI of 5.8, the WD 5.4. While the WD outperforms the Seagate in real life.

Whether one should take the WEI score for hard drives seriously I'll leave that up to everyone to decide on their own.

 

show the hdtunes of both if you can, please.

that would help. so far, wei looks similar to what hd tune reports. that doesn't mean something about taking it seriously, or not, though..

the samsung ssds are in benchmarks quite fine, too (except in the newest ones). and they still suck at the feeling they give..

 

I already posted them on the previous page.

 

ah, yeah, seen them now. well.. as i said before: both suck and one has faster memory bandwith. the other has some percent faster random access speeds..

but they are both just snails

 

Just for reference (I'm not taking this seriously, so you shouldn't either), my Intel X-25 32nm 80GB on a fresh Win7 install scored 7.7.

 

I'm still sticking to my comment made earlier
The harddrive will always be the slowest part of the computer. (unless you have vista, cause than that is)
The graphics, processor and memory can do lightyears more work than the harddrive can.

K-TRON

 

i think WEI just bases your score on the hardware you have and not how fast it actually is becasue my score has never changed on anything and when i got my laptop with its orginal drivers etc it was far slower than it is now and yet the score is the same. i wonder what the score will do when i get a new hdd

 

Welcome back

I don't want to argue with you K-TRON but Vista is a very good OS - yes, the start was pretty bad - but especially with SP2 its a very solid OS - and I personally will not change to Win7 (on my current laptop) and the short time I had Win7 it was as fast as Vista.

Well, hardware, processor and RAM can't really change as they aren't driver dependant.

That leaves graphics that is affected by drivers - and I believe my X3100 did change with Intel drivers... but Intel drivers are too hot... but I think its higher on Sony's ancient drivers too...

For the graphics WEI score its really a question as to what it tests.

Game performance is a combination of the games commands and the driver and how its rendered.

 

Just want to say I can agree with K-TRON if we're talking about Vista 32bit, but not for x64 versions.

DetlevCM, Vista vs. Win 7 (both x64), Win 7 is noticeably faster. Not only on the storage subsystem, but also the UI too. Much better.

 

The user interface is pretty much instantaneous for me - on a 32Bit OS - on a 64Bit OS I'm sure its too.
And you can't really see ms can you?

 

If ms=microseconds, not I can't see them. But I can feel them.

 

Yes, I meant milliseconds - 1/1000s (micro is 1/1000000s).

You can't feel that - how could you?
If its a break in music or a film - maybe - a user interface that you click on, how?

 

my scores changed with better drivers.

 

problem is, if you're into music and such, then every latency of some milliseconds is very noticable as you get used to such tiny parts of time. i even detect easily if something reacts on the down or up of a mouseclick.. when clicking fast. the delay on reacting on release is very feelable for me.

and K-TRON: you wanted to make a good statement, and killed it with random vista bashing.. sad

 

DetlevCM,

I thought I might have trouble explaining, but davepermen said it very well.

Thanks davepermen!

 

And you make comments having never used 10K/15K drives or raid controllers

Like I have said before, those who bash harddrives have never used a real harddrive.
Once you have gone into SCSI320/SAS/FibreChannel, you cant go back.
Dont give me that, oh I can feel every MS of seek time, maybe on a 4200rpm drive, but come on.
Make an argument, which makes sense

K-TRON

 

As opposed to what? We're talking consumer grade notebook hard drives dude. Not enterprise level HDD's which require totally different data/power requirements (such as those seen in your Octitron "notebook" solution) which are wholly incompatible with consumer grade laptops.