I decided to change my relatively old Samsung HD160JJ hdd disk (made in 2005) to the other one. I used it for my operating systems and kept it out of personal data as much as possible and I successfully used it in four absolutely different configurations for these five years. The main reason for the change was to free one 3.5'' HDD disk place above the CPU as I needed to change cpu fan to higher and quieter one (as I wrote earlier, I changed it to default AMD fan from Jetway very loud one but AMD fan broke and I was forced to return to Jetway one). So I was searching only for 2.5'' hdds. The second reason was even more appealing as I wished to have more modern and a little bit faster disk. It is not a secret that every generation has faster disks and they improved considerably during 5 years.
SSD is still out of reach for me so my first stop was a hybrid Seagate Momentus XT disk. However I decided to buy and new graphics card (GTS450), because of this I ended up with considerably cheaper classic Seagate Momentus 7200.4 2.5'' 250GB HDD. It won't give me a big boost in speed but in the end it still should be faster, consume less power and occupy less space in my mini-itx case and give better access to my CPU. At least, I was expecting that.
So, I made some tests with HD tune and HDtach to confirm my expectations. It turned out that Seagate had 40-50% faster transfer rate on average (but slower than my Seagate 1.5TB 7200rpm hard drive), better results at write/read and sequential access, burst rate. However, random access time was better only with bigger files. Small files (less than 1MB) were a weak point for the Seagate hdd.
I didn't do real world tests except compared boot time for NetBSD and Fedora Linux 13. It wasn't much improvement but boot time reduced by second or two with both operating systems (I measured time from the start to login screen several times and results were the same constantly). Programs seemed to load a little bit faster (less than a second) too but I didn't know a good tool to calculate load time so it could be inaccurate decision. Besides, copy speed (big 2GB file) from my NAS server showed constant >85MB/s speed compared to 65MB/s to Samsung drive. However copy speed from WD Caviar GP in the same computer was almost at the same speed (probably WD limitation?). Copy speed from Seagate to Samsung was faster than from Samsung to Seagate (again it seems like Samsung limitation).
What is more I can say that Seagate 2.5'' hdd is virtually inaudible contrary to old Samsung which had a little clatter when it had worked. Finally Seagate reports about 5-9°C degrees less than Samsung (35°C vs 44°C on full load). I guess it uses less power too (it is 2.5'' and more modern hdd after all).
Transition was made by dd tool in Fedora (I just cloned a disc). Everything went smoothly. All my systems booted as they should (I have 5 operating systems in my main computer currently). So I am quite happy with this upgrade as it lived up almost all my expectations. Nothing spectacular (you need ssd for that) but generally more or less better in almost all areas. I changed Jetway fan to Glacialtech 92mm one and the system is much quieter now. Only a 60mm case cooler is quite loud still (though I slowed down it a bit too). However, system becomes to hot without it.
What about GTS450? I bought it for folding@home. It showed incredible results with 915, 925 points projects where it managed to gain 10000-13000ppd. However ppd reduced to ~6500 and ~8000 accordingly with 6811 and 6800 projects. Unfortunately I got only 6811projects recently. I loaded Starcraft II with it too. The game didn't show a message that my graphics card was to slow anymore :) and worked perfectly with max configurations on 1280x1024 resolution. It is a one of the cheapest Gigabyte models and it is inaudible at idle, however, becomes a little bit noisy when fan reaches 28-30% of the rotation speed on full load (it tries to keep 71°C temperature on full load).
P.S. next eComStation review probably won't be until the end of this year. Sorry.
SSD is still out of reach for me so my first stop was a hybrid Seagate Momentus XT disk. However I decided to buy and new graphics card (GTS450), because of this I ended up with considerably cheaper classic Seagate Momentus 7200.4 2.5'' 250GB HDD. It won't give me a big boost in speed but in the end it still should be faster, consume less power and occupy less space in my mini-itx case and give better access to my CPU. At least, I was expecting that.
So, I made some tests with HD tune and HDtach to confirm my expectations. It turned out that Seagate had 40-50% faster transfer rate on average (but slower than my Seagate 1.5TB 7200rpm hard drive), better results at write/read and sequential access, burst rate. However, random access time was better only with bigger files. Small files (less than 1MB) were a weak point for the Seagate hdd.
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| Seagate benchmark |
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| Samsung benchmark |
What is more I can say that Seagate 2.5'' hdd is virtually inaudible contrary to old Samsung which had a little clatter when it had worked. Finally Seagate reports about 5-9°C degrees less than Samsung (35°C vs 44°C on full load). I guess it uses less power too (it is 2.5'' and more modern hdd after all).
Transition was made by dd tool in Fedora (I just cloned a disc). Everything went smoothly. All my systems booted as they should (I have 5 operating systems in my main computer currently). So I am quite happy with this upgrade as it lived up almost all my expectations. Nothing spectacular (you need ssd for that) but generally more or less better in almost all areas. I changed Jetway fan to Glacialtech 92mm one and the system is much quieter now. Only a 60mm case cooler is quite loud still (though I slowed down it a bit too). However, system becomes to hot without it.
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| Inside my computer |
P.S. next eComStation review probably won't be until the end of this year. Sorry.
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