benchmark interpetation?

i am clueless as to how to interpret these benchmarks.

can anyone tell me what they mean...why do the first and second benchmark graphs differ so much?

hp pavilion g60-120us amd dual core 2ghz, 3gb ram, 250gb hd, geforce 8200m
vista home premium.

running firefox with multiple tabs open, majic jack-internet phone, virus and spyware.

 

they're not that different. look at your average transfer rate. thats how fast you move stuff to and from your hd

 

is a transfer rate of around 43 good...how does that compare to others?

 

I'd be more worried about those temps, if they are accurate anyway.

Laptop hard drives don't break 60-70MB/s often, that curve looks similar to my two drives.

 

I would get an accurate temperature reading as soon as you can on that notebook.

As the above poster said, if the 57C reading is correct your in for some issues down the road. Below 40C is generally the optimal temperature, preferably low 30s.

Most HD's will quickly fail at 55-60C over an extended period of time. I would check to make sure your ventilation is working properly, other components may be causing/contributing to the problem.

Edit: Saw that you are using an HP G60. I work at Costco and regularly see them returned for overheating/fan failure issues. Though I'm not an expert I would say a 10% failure rate is a good estimate based on my personal experience. HP makes a ton of quality laptops (mostly business class), but it seems certain models are below acceptable standards.

 

Okay okay but nobody actually answered his question.

HD Tune runs a series of read tests to determine the speed of the hard drive. A mechanical hard drive reads data from the outside in, and due to geometry (the circle gets smaller as the drive progresses towards the center), transfer rate drops as the drive head goes to the inside. This is why a full hard drive is slower, it's not that the files "weigh down" the drive, it's because the drive spends more time in the slower region.

Okay now, the graph should be a nice smooth downward slope. However, HD Tune works under Windows, which is a multi-tasking system. So naturally, there will be other programs (including Windows itself) accessing the hard drive during the test. That explains the dips in the graph.

Quitting all running software (including antivirus) before running such a test will yield the most accurate results. If the transfer rate still has sharp dips then, you may have a failing hard drive. However bootable drive diagnostics such as MHDD or Victoria (found on Hiren's Boot CD) will give you a much more detailed and unpolluted view on the drive's physical condition.

 

i'm getting conflicting reports about the heat issue...some people seem to think it's okay while others say it's not., so i took it into a repair shop and was told that the temperature varies according to manufacturers and i shouldn't worry about it as long as the fan is working which he confirmed.

when he turned it on it was around 40c and after he blew out the dust with a can it went down to 35c., but that's with nothing running.

it seems like running any sort of apps significantly raised the temp- particulary majic jack and ultimate defrag.

here's two more graphs run back to back with everything turned off including virus and spyware.

strange that the first graph is relatively smooth, while the second spikes like crazy.

what do the star-like clusters represent?

 

Those dots are access times on the different parts of the disk, the left size is the outside of the disk, and the right is the inside, left is faster, right is slower, the higher the dot the slower the access time.

And its rare a Laptop's CPU/GPU fan cools a hard drive, weird someone would say that but okay.