Are these good hard drive speeds?

[Blue Palmetto]

I bought a hard drive second hand from eBay a few months ago and it works fine, but I'm not sure if the read speeds are slow and if buying a newer hard drive would help. Are these speeds good or abnormally slow for this machine?

HD Tune: SEAGATE ST3750640NS Benchmark

Transfer Rate Minimum : 29.9 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 79.9 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 60.3 MB/sec
Access Time : 15.7 ms
Burst Rate : 3.5 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 4.8%

My System:

Dell Dimension 9200/XPS 410
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz
MSI Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 Gaming 100 Million Edition
8GB 667MHz DDR2 RAM
Seagate Barracuda ES 750GB HDD (ST3750640NS)
Windows 10 Pro

 

[martinch]

A quick Google indicates the specified maximum transfer rate for that drive is around 75MB/s, so it would appear to be about right.

http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/support/disc/manuals/enterprise/Barracuda%20ES/SATA/100424667b.pdf

Having said that, those speeds do appear to be quite pedestrian compared to a modern drive - my WD Red 3TB (WD30EFRX) and WD Black 2TB (WD2003FZEX) both manage an observed (via Windows) 130-150MB/s when doing large sequential writes.

 

[skit75]

A quick Google indicates the specified maximum transfer rate for that drive is around 75MB/s, so it would appear to be about right.

http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/support/disc/manuals/enterprise/Barracuda%20ES/SATA/100424667b.pdf

Having said that, those speeds do appear to be quite pedestrian compared to a modern drive - my WD Red 3TB (WD30EFRX) and WD Black 2TB (WD2003FZEX) both manage an observed (via Windows) 130-150MB/s when doing large sequential writes.

Those are also Enterprise and Performance level hard drives. Sort of apples to oranges.

 

[Blue Palmetto]

A quick Google indicates the specified maximum transfer rate for that drive is around 75MB/s, so it would appear to be about right.

http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/support/disc/manuals/enterprise/Barracuda%20ES/SATA/100424667b.pdf

Having said that, those speeds do appear to be quite pedestrian compared to a modern drive - my WD Red 3TB (WD30EFRX) and WD Black 2TB (WD2003FZEX) both manage an observed (via Windows) 130-150MB/s when doing large sequential writes.

Those are also Enterprise and Performance level hard drives. Sort of apples to oranges.

Would my system benefit from the newest hard drives? I don't think I need SATA 6gbps.

 

[skit75]

Not in any meaningful way when compared to adding in an SSD, instead. If you are constantly doing large file swaps, maybe. But for ordinary use, gaming etc... I wouldn't upgrade to one of those premium spindle drives... I would just get an SSD.

 

[martinch]

Those are also Enterprise and Performance level hard drives. Sort of apples to oranges.

Whilst the WD Blacks are "performance" drives, their "speed" comes from high random I/O speed (for a HDD), rather than sequential speeds. The WD Reds aren't exactly marketed as being fast (they're 5,900rpm, and suffer from "slow" seeks), and WD's Blue range - marketed as consumer value drives - have the same maximum transfer rate specification.

I whole-heartedly agree that the best performance increase would come from a ~250-500GB SSD like the Crucial MX200 or Samsung 850 EVO, putting the OS & applications on it, and then mounting the HDD for document libraries, though.

 

[skit75]

I selected the WD Black 640GB for that very reason... 64MB Cache and only two 320GB platters, makes for great seek times. I didn't create the marketing categories, obviously. Everyone knows WD Red are marketed towards enterprise\industry and WD Blacks are marketed towards performance builds, each for their own host of reasons... speed just being one of the factors. Other qualities are more important to other industries, such as reliability, power consumption and warranty.

 

[martinch]

I selected the WD Black 640GB for that very reason... 64MB Cache and only two 320GB platters, makes for great seek times.

Yeah, they were good drives (I had 2).

Everyone knows WD Red are marketed towards enterprise\industry

Maybe I'm coloured by my experience (large IT department), but I'd consider the Reds as consumer, or small business drives. If you want enterprise NAS drives, then WD have the SE range, which carry a longer warranty (5 years vs 3 years), higher MTBF, are "reassuringly expensive", and don't carry any warnings about about putting too many drives in an enclosure (it could just be marketing, but we did have someone build a 10-drive array with the previous generation of drives, and whilst they all powered up & passed self-test OK, within one day 3 of the disks had failed...could just be coincidence...).

Other qualities are more important to other industries, such as reliability, power consumption and warranty.

Very true.