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.