Which HDD for Primary?

Twist86

Twist86

Active Member
So I finally got a working Black Drive and I must say not very impressed with the speeds. I expected a bit better than what I have seen so far. I got all my tweaks done and did a test and here were my results.



I am curious if the 10ms vs 14ms would make any difference or if the 32mb cache would provide benefit over the current seagate I am using. I just ask as one of these will be used as my primary storage unit so it doesn't matter but would prefer the better of the two. It honestly doesn't feel any better and it seems to hang from time to time. It also is much louder than my seagate drive but nothing I couldn't live with.

The current seagate drive has been active 2 weeks and the WD is fresh install so I am sure there would be some drops later down. This really shocked me on the 4kb random read....I mean I expected the WD to do better but that is simply silly the difference.


*edit*
I went a head and ran CrystalDiskMark and got some surprising results.
Seagate Drive


Western Digital Black



The only question is if I put 100GB on the WD would the drive be any different in terms of speeds? If not is it based off usage? Like I said the seagate only has a 2 week old OS on it but has a few more active programs running on start up.
 
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Are you set on adding a hard drive as your primary? If you are a fan of Seagate, you might try their Momentus hybrids, or if you're into Western Digital- check out their Velociraptors. Both strike me as a higher performance hard drive, without going the extra mile for solid state drives. Also, have you ever tried a software called Soluto? It gives you more control over how your system boots, what processes you can remove/keep. For faster boot times you might give it a look:
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I am not looking to buy a new drive, I am just deciding if the WD drive is good enough to warrant transferring all my crap over to it for primary use. From what I can tell while the WD transfers faster I don't think performance side would be noticeable.
 
Twist86 said:
Well thanks for adding nothing to this thread. I had a SSD and they are not that fantastic for the price and all the hoops you have to jump through for writes. Not worth it.
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Its a question only Twist86:
Whats the problem your having with SSD drive? Mentioned about writes.
Just curious.
tremmor
 
Its not so much a problem its the lingering "limited" writes to a SSD that bother me. You have to really manage your programs/OS/etc properly in order to get the most out of your SSD and it actually took the enjoyment out of owning a SSD for me. I did all the tweaks and even optimized my OS size/services down to where very little writes were being done to the drive.
Given the Vertex life tool based off normal usage I would have maxed the drive within 1 year 6 months 13 days.
Then to add to the mix was the thing I missed and that was the 20% rule for sandforce drives. If you go over 80% you will lose a lot of performance so they advise you to take 20% off during install.
By the time it was all said and done it was 65GB before OS install. Now I am not sure if Intel also suffers from this but it was the final straw with me.

The price for the performance truly is not worth the hassle/longevity of the drive. Least I got my cash back and learned some valuable lessons about the drives.
 
I'd call those speed drops anomalies, transfer lots of data from one drive to another and back, see which one is the fastest, real world results are what count :)
 
linkin said:
I'd call those speed drops anomalies, transfer lots of data from one drive to another and back, see which one is the fastest, real world results are what count :)
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Yeah I am going with the WD.....even if the transfer isn't as fast (which it is) the access time is lower and the seek is faster.

tremmor said:
I know its another job but it has been brought up before. How to set up the SSD for performance. Just another adventure.

http://www.computerforum.com/186707-ssd-discussion.html
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Thanks for the link but I went WAY beyond what that thread has. I went just short of ultra over kill lol. BTW a downside with RamDisks they slow your boot up/boot down by 10-20 seconds. I had my Firefox cache/profile setup on a 100mb ramdisk to get a huge amount of writes reduced.
 
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