Hard Drive Compatibility with different computers

zomboromano · 19 Apr 2014

And considering I don't plan to upgrade hard drives for awhile, are both hard drives even worth keeping or could I sell it and get enough money out of it to make it worth it?

whs · 19 Apr 2014

The performance of the Hitachi is no better than that of the Seagate. But it is much more reliable.

People who have thousands of disks and kept records over years have reported that the Hitachis have the least failures followed by WD and that Seagates have failed very often.

Since those are real life numbers I trust them more than any benchmarks.

zomboromano · 19 Apr 2014

I would disagree.

Companies can make lower quality products to cater to a certain demographic, but that doesn't mean they don't make any high quality products.

Certain drives are going to perform faster than other ones and general statistics on two brands won't tell me what hard drive will give me better performance. I'm not necessarily looking to see what hard drive will last me 20 years, just which one is faster. And a simple brand name won't tell me which one will perform better.

That doesn't mean I don't appreciate you commenting. I'm just looking more to see if anyone knows any good benchmark sites that could show specifically how these two drives perform against each other, and based off of those what I should install on what drive to get the best performance with what I have

zomboromano · 19 Apr 2014

The benchmarks I posted show out of 90 samples, the hard drive was under half of the performance of the seagate. While I know it might not be that big of a difference in reality, it's there. I think I might just need a few more overall opinions.

EDIT:

Let me say I've done my own research and I find some good value in what your saying. It's not just the brand even itself, but the Barracuda hard drive in particular does have a bigger fail rate. So if the Seagate won't give me much better performance than I think the best way to go would actually be to follow your advice. whs. I really appreciate it.

I just want to get the most performance out of what I have, and the most bang for my buck. Maybe I could sell that hard drive for $30 bucks and buy a good SSD for around $100

whs · 19 Apr 2014

If you look for performance (of the OS), you have to look at access times. An avaerage HDD has an access time of 15ms - an average SSD has an access time of 0.1ms. That is 150 times faster and the reason why SSDs are so fast.

Even my 128GB stick has an access time of 0.7ms and can beat any HDD hands down. That shows when I run my system from the stick. I have another 65GB stick that I just bought with an access time of 0.3ms. But I have not yet installed a system on it.

Now that is for the OS that deals with a lot of random access 4KB files. For streaming large amounts of data in large blocks in a sequential fashion, that is another story. Here I have made a comparison once using an imaging program writing to a SSD, a SSHD (btw a Seagate) and a HDD. Here is the data. As you can see, the differences are not that significant because that is not random access. Here the data transfer rate plays the main role.

zomboromano · 19 Apr 2014

So what is your recommendation? I could probably sell the Seagate for 20-30. I could also use it to backup files. I'm not any good with making a partition or anything, but maybe I could use it for partitions? I would probably get a a SSD in a few months.

I also heard making a small partition on my drive and installing windows could improve performance. What is the best recommendation considering the resources I have?

whs · 19 Apr 2014

Right now I would keep the OS on the Hitachi and use the Seagate for e.g. images. Reducing the size of the C partitioon will not really help. But for better safety of your data it would make sense to seperate the user data from the OS and put it into a seperate partition.

It makes no sense to sell the disk. They are always useful to have. I have kept about 20 of them plus 7 SSDs - and they are all used for something. Just on this system I have 2 internal and 4 external disks.

ignatzatsonic · 20 Apr 2014

You could download HDTune_255.exe from this link at no charge and test the speed of the drives yourself:

HD Tune website

The Hitachi is from circa 2007; it has a small 8 mb buffer.

I'll save you the trouble of testing it yourself; here is an HDTune test of it.

Note access time of 19 ms.

The Seagate is from circa 2010 or 2011. I couldn't find an online test of it, but you could test it yourself with that download.

The Seagate is clearly faster as you'd expect and as the Passmark tests confirm. It has a larger 64mb buffer and denser platters.

BUT, whether or not it's enough faster to make your computing experience better is another question. Maybe it isn't.

Nobody knows which of your drives will last longer. It's unknowable. Either of them could drop dead later today.

Keep your expectations low regardless. If speed is your only concern, I'd put the OS and as much as possible of everything else on the Seagate. BUT be prepared to say "I can't tell the difference between the two drives, so I'd be better off saving and upgrading the CPU".

You're pretty much trying to feed oats to a dying horse. Not likely to have a good outcome and mostly a waste of your time.

zomboromano · 22 Apr 2014

I've got one more question now that I think about it.

We have concluded that technically the Seagate is faster,

But it might not make much of a difference.

Personally it seems like too much work to reinstall the operating system on there. It would take awhile , and would maybe involve taking it off the other hard drive, it seems like a bigger pain.

However simply moving my games and a few other applications seems really ready easy.

My question is, would I need to move the operating system AND my games to have any type of performance increase or would moving the games alone give me an increase? Does that make sense? I know moving the operating system over might make it start a little quicker but I'm mainly wanting to know if moving the operating system effects other applications and programs, if that makes sense.

Seems easier just to move my games

ignatzatsonic · 22 Apr 2014

I don't game, but my guess would be that moving anything will have very little effect and would not be worth your effort.

Application performance and gaming performance are mostly determined by CPU power and the graphics card. Drive speed can have an effect, but it would be marginal when comparing one HDD with another.

If an elf transferred your OS to the faster drive while you slept tonight and you started the PC tomorrow without knowing what the elf did, I wouldn't be surprised in the least if you didn't notice any difference at all.

Sure, you would see some differences in benchmarks, but that's far from what you would actually experience.

You're limited by your hardware, which you are unable to change.

But since you think it would be easy to move your games, you can always do it and answer your own question about how much difference it might make.