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srg86
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Fastest 7200RPM 1 TB drive

Sat Apr 21, 2012 1:49 pm

Hi All

Since replacing the main OS drive in my machine with an m4 SSD, the second hard disk, with my home directory which I work on is now really starting to feel like a bit of a boat anchor.

The drive in question is a 500GB WD Caviar SE16 from about 2007. In the TR review in 2006 it is shown to have 3 125GB platters. The drive still works great and I've only half filled it, so capacity isn't a problem, it's performance.

I really don't need anything bigger than 1TB so I was wondering, what is the fastest 7200RPM 1TB drive on the market and what has the best areal density. Would I even notice that much of a difference between this old drive and the modern ones?

From what I've seen, the choices are between the 1TB versions of the:

WD Caviar Black
Hitachi 7K3000
Seagate Baracuda 3TB
Samsung Spinpoint F3.

I've not had great luck with seagates and I've noticed that since seagate took over samsung the newegg reviews seem to have taken a turn for the worse.

What I do to stress the drive is either code compiling (especially when compiling GCC) and running virtual machines from the drive. The drive will mainly be handling lots of small files rather than a few large ones, so maybe access time is more important? I'd love to go VelociRaptor, but I can't afford one, so a 7200RPM drive would do.

Thanks!
srg
Intel Core i7 4790K, Z97, 16GB RAM, 128GB m4 SSD, 480GB M500 SSD, 500GB WD Vel, Intel HD4600, Corsair HX650, Fedora x64.
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P5-133XL
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Re: Fastest 7200RPM 1 TB drive

Sat Apr 21, 2012 2:18 pm

May I suggest getting yourself a Cheetah at 15k RPMs or even a Raptor at 10K RPMs. As an alternative (or in addition), get yourself another SSD and use it as a caching drive. A third alternative is just get a much bigger SSD. Lots of much better choices than a consumer level 7200K RPM drive.

Yes, for your application access time is far more important than sequential transfer speeds.
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mortifiedPenguin
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Re: Fastest 7200RPM 1 TB drive

Sat Apr 21, 2012 2:23 pm

While not a perfect comparison, you can use TR's A storage performance retrospective which happens to have both your drive and the Barracuda 7200.12 to compare to the newer Terabyte roundup which has the other three drives in it. They use different baseline system configurations so the numbers won't line up perfectly, but they should give you a rough idea since many of the benchmarks themselves are the same.

That said, I'd wager to guess that the old drive is starting to feel like an anchor simply because of how fast the m4 is. In the Performance Retrospective article, you can already see how much faster the X-25M is; looking at the initial m4 review that happens to compare the F3, X-25M, and the m4 you actually can get a direct comparison with one of the drives you're looking at. I'm not saying don't buy a new drive, however, you should still see a slight boost in performance; just don't expect it to be a huge improvement since you've been "spoiled" by an SSD.
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srg86
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Re: Fastest 7200RPM 1 TB drive

Sat Apr 21, 2012 2:24 pm

P5-133XL wrote:
May I suggest getting yourself a Cheetah at 15k RPMs or even a Raptor at 10K RPMs. As an alternative (or in addition), get yourself another SSD and use it as a caching drive. A third alternative is just get a much bigger SSD. Lots of much better choices than a consumer level 7200K RPM drive.

Yes, for your application access time is far more important than sequential transfer speeds.


All far too expensive although the Raptor sounds reasonable (though I'm not sure about its reliability).

Does the SSD caching solutions even work in Linux? If so, it maybe worth a look.

mortifiedPenguin wrote:
While not a perfect comparison, you can use TR's A storage performance retrospective which happens to have both your drive and the Barracuda 7200.12 to compare to the newer Terabyte roundup which has the other three drives in it. They use different baseline system configurations so the numbers won't line up perfectly, but they should give you a rough idea since many of the benchmarks themselves are the same.

That said, I'd wager to guess that the old drive is starting to feel like an anchor simply because of how fast the m4 is. In the Performance Retrospective article, you can already see how much faster the X-25M is; looking at the initial m4 review that happens to compare the F3, X-25M, and the m4 you actually can get a direct comparison with one of the drives you're looking at. I'm not saying don't buy a new drive, however, you should still see a slight boost in performance; just don't expect it to be a huge improvement since you've been "spoiled" by an SSD.


Thanks, these look like they will be very helpful, I'm surprised I missed them in my search.

Maybe I just have indeed been spoiled by the SSD, I still hope a better mechanical drive can at least help.
Intel Core i7 4790K, Z97, 16GB RAM, 128GB m4 SSD, 480GB M500 SSD, 500GB WD Vel, Intel HD4600, Corsair HX650, Fedora x64.
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