low HDtune score with 7200 harddrive

Hi all,

I just purchased Hitachi 100gb 7200rpm for my Fujitsu N6420. The burst rate is very disappointing around 50bm while it hs to be at least 100mb. any clue what could be the reason?

The Fujitsu 200gb 4200 drive that came with the laptop has higher burst rate (around 74mb/s) but average tranfer rate and access time is lower than the Hitachi.

Frankly speaking, I did not notice any speed increase between both drives.

Is my Hitachi drive faulty?

A screenshoot of HDtune for the Hitachi drive

 

Was your laptop plugged in or you ran the benchmark on battery ?

 

it was plugged in. I updated drivers, reinstalled windows and the scores are the same

 

That is lower then expected. Any noise or else that might give an indecation?
Have a look in the device manager and the properties of the hard disk controller. Does it tell you the current tranfer mode under advanced settings? what is it using?

 

Actually your scores look perfectly normal to me. Here's an HDTune 2.1 benchmark I ran on a review laptop that had a Hitachi 100GB 7200RPM SATA drive:
http://www.notebookreview.com/assets/17064.jpg

Nothing to worry about. I wouldn't worry about the burst rate. The minimum and average score are more important.

 

Thanks for your answer.

The driver controller is the recenet one from Intel and as shown in the attached image.

The problem is in the drive hardware or firmware, the burst speed is far from normal, I think I better contact Hitachi and see what they think.

 

There is no advanced setting for the SATA controller. The ATA channel 0 says that ATA advanced setting for the cdrom is DMA mode 2

 

I agree with Chaz, the overall performance seems fine to me. I don't believe the burst rate for mine was any higher than yours.

 

That interface performance result is low. The charts at Tom's Hardware suggest that an SATA interface should delivery 100MB/s or better.

Tom's Hardware used h2benchw for its interface performance measurements. You could try that or HD Tach to get a second opinion about the performance. I attach my plot for HD Tach. It seems to give higher interface performance results for me than HDTune.

As for comparing the relative performance between 100GB 7200 and 200GB 4200 yes, the only real benefit of the 7200RPM is shorter access times. The higher data density of the bigger HDD is giving better transfer rates.

While visiting Tom's Hardware I see there is a group review of several 160GB 2.5" HDDs.

John

 

Thanks everyone for your help

I benchmarked the Hitachi using hdtach 3.0.4.0 and attached is the result. The burst rate is much better than what hdtune reads but it is 15% less than the 200gb 4200 that I have. I still wonder why hdtune posting such low burst score.

I run h2benchw but could not understand it the result since the language is not english

 

running h2benchw in english now

 

Below is the result of h2benchw

random access time 14.82
interface speed 10gb size:
sequentical read rate w/o delay 47.4mb/s
sequentical tranfer rate w/ read-head (delay 1:45ms) 50.2mb/s
repetitive sequential read 68.5mb/s

Not sure which one is the burst rate but I think it is the repetitive which is 68.5mb/s, which is lower than what Tom's Hardware posted for the same drive with 40mb/s

something is wrong

 

I think the burst rate is the interface speed. There seems to be no result for this in your post. The 100MB/s shown by HD Tach is not impressive.

That is the speed at which your HDD can get data from its on-board cache RAM (usually 8MB) through the cable to your computer. Once what (if any) part of a file from the cache has gone down the wire then the controlling factor on performance is the speed at which data can be sucked off the disk and through the head. That's the transfer rate and your results for that are fine.

John