Hard Disk speed comparison

These are five hard disks that I have in three machines that I frequently access.

Machine	Drive	MB/s	Model	Description
Pavilion	C	35/35	ST3250823AS	Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 ST3250823AS 250GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 1.5Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive -Bare Drive
Pluto	C	225/225	PFZ128GS25SSDR	Patriot Torqx PFZ128GS25SSDR 2.5" Internal Solid state disk (SSD)
Pluto	E	60/120	ST32000542AS	Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB 3.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive -Bare Drive
Monster	C	150/200	WD3000GLFS-01F8U0	Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB 3.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
Monster	D	90/110	ST31500341AS	Seagate Barracuda LP 1.5TB 3.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive -Bare Drive

I was thinking of replacing the 250GB Seagate in the Pavilion to improve performance on that machine but wanted to get an idea of what sort of performance boost I thought I might be able to get so I copied some hard disk benchmarking software (ATTO) onto each of the machines and ran it.

The MB/s column shows the write/read speeds measured for each disk. This is a rough average for each disk.

My surprises were as follows:

• The solid state drive (SSD) was not much faster than the velociraptor.
• The seagate 1.5TB had a faster write time than the 2TB. (It doesn't feel faster, it feels slower.)
• The 2TB driver is less that twice as fast as the old 250GB Seagate. (Again, the 2TB drive feels much faster.)

I've decided to replace the Pavilion's 250GB Seagate with a 2TB Seagate. The bottleneck with that machine at the moment is the hard disk and I'm confident that I'm going to get at least a triple speed improvement even though the numbers don't give that.

Since I installed my Windows Home Server nothing has crashed on my network so I have been unable to try out recovering a hard disk from its backup. I plan on using this new disk as an opportunity to try this with the Pavilion machine. I will add the new hard disk and then set the bios to treat this disk as the boot drive. I think that I then have to generate a recovery CD from which this machine will boot and restore the OS etc. to the new disk.

I'll post a link to my results here when done.