Upgraded hard drive, transfer speed questionable?

I upgraded my laptop hard drive from WD scropio blue 5400rpm sata 3.0gb/s 8mb cache to a hitachi 7200rpm sata2 6.0gb/s 32mb cache. Doing some actual transfer test consisting of game clips and program downloads, folder to folder copy transfer hitachi starts off around 90mb/s then quickly drops down to 30-45mb/s, isn't this drive suppose to have constant 100mb/s transfer speed? HD tune shows 120-136 mb/s maximum, average is around 88-104 mb/s. My old WD scropio blue shows 75 mb/s max and 51-59 mb/s average.

 

It makes sense. What was the exact model of your WD blue drive and HGST drive? The newest WD Blue and the HGST drive use 500gb platters (therefore same transfer speeds at 5400RPM) but the Hitachi drive has a roughly 33% transfer speed superiority due to the faster spindle speed. The phenomena you are seeing is because of the fact you are using the HDD as a system drive, those drops are when the HDD heads are being repositioned to perform background operations (e.g. Superfetch and Prefetch) in Windows.

 

There are two things going on here:

1) Defragment your hard drive before running tests. If you're doing a folder-to-folder copy using the same drive as both the source and destination, then you might be running into a situation where your drive spends a lot of time in seek operations because of source file fragmentation.

2) I really wouldn't worry about it. You're measuring sequential read/write numbers, which accounts for only about 5% of the data access patterns from a primary storage drive. Do comparisons of 5400rpm vs 7200rpm random read/write speeds, and I think you'll be happier with the difference.

 

Those reported number are theoretical tests not actual world usage test. As some mentioned it most likely won't affect your usage overall. If you compared those to a SSD now that would be something else. Test are test not really a reflection of the different usage and task they HDD are put through on a daily basis that changes from min to min.

 

Not to disagree with above comments. They sounded interesting but then I just stopped being concerned.

i5 all platters/circular drives have a downward slope. Faster on the outer and slower on the inner. so constant? USB sticks were the first to show us flat lines then SSD's. HDD as a matter of "physical" reality will as said slope down.

I see your charts. As was said defragment the 1000GB Hitachi see if it helps your random is way out there. But do you notice the spikes on both? Is that not requests taking priority? The 1st and obvious is turn off your anti-virus. If you want to test your HDD then turn off stuff. I want to see a line. It will slope down but your spikes are out of control.

I am not sure what is really wrong with your tested speeds. Real life a whole different story. I don't get benchmark speeds in file transfers.

 

I only have one partition (c: drive) no separate data partition., these tests are done with avira realtime protection turned on.