December 3, 2010
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My new hardware
I recently purchased three new hard drives for my computer. One was a Crucial C300 RealSSD at 128GB, the other two were Western Digital Caviar Black’s at 640GB each (Western Digital no longer makes their Black drive in 640GB, so get ‘em while they’re cheap!). Before the drives came, I ran some benchmarks on the drive/system I was running at the time. The drive was a 500GB Western Digital Caviar Blue with 16MB of Cache, and it was pretty old. Below is a Crystal DiskMark of the hard drive, and a Windows Experience Index (WEI) readout of the system with this drive.
WEI with WD Caviar Blue and EVGA GeForce 9800GT:
Crystal Disk Mark readout of WD Caviar Blue:
That’s actually fairly decent as far as the standards for HDD’s go. Now let’s look at a WEI and CrystalDiskMark of the same system with a SATA III SSD, two Caviar Black’s in RAID 0, and a Radeon HD 5670.
I was really surprised to see just how fast those WD Caviar Black’s were in RAID 0. The Sequential Read and Write speeds are neck in neck, and the write speed of the HDD’s for both Sequential and 512k random writes are actually faster than the SSD! The two video cards are pretty close in performance, the nVidia card at 6.9 and the ATI card at 7.0, but the rating difference between the old HDD and the new SSD/HDD setup is crazy. 5.9 to 7.5 (out of 7.9). It’s nice to finally be rid of that old clunker, and my External WD MyBook. Don’t buy one of those, they’re slower than molasses. I suppose that’s ok if you’re just using it for a backup, but seriously, don’t try using one as you would an internal hard drive. Bad news.
