I went to Micro Center this week to buy a new external hard drive; my 120G internal laptop drive is too full. I thought I’d try to get the fastest one I could, so I got a FireWire 800 enclosure and a new Segate 320G 7200RPM drive with a 16MB cache. Since I spent a little extra on fast parts, I thought I’d benchmark a bit. After timing some drag-and-drop operations, I was coming out with around 30MB/sec, which seemed too slow for this equipment.
I’m not a storage guy, but I seem to remember 33Mb/sec as an old transfer rate speed to ATA drives. A great Wikipedia article confirmed my hunch. I was instantly irritated with the vendors of this drive enclosure, so I wrote up a quick program to benchmark this thing.
The program confirmed that I was getting right about 30MB/sec copying a 2G file from my laptop to the external drive. So, just for the sake of comparison, I changed the program to simply writing 1GB worth of 0’s and pointed it at my internal hard drive.
30MB/sec.
I use a 17″ MacBook Pro for most of my dev work; I work in one of several VMs depending on the environment I’m developing for. My System Profiler tells me that I have a 1.5Gb/s (192MB/s) SATA controller with an attached Segate 120G 5400RPM drive. No obvious reason it would come in at 30MB/s sustained write.
I then tried my program on my new external drive. 57 MB/sec. Waaaay better. This is about what I’d expect out of this drive.
So, I have no idea why my internal drive’s sustained transfer rate is roughly 1/2 of my external drive’s. The data sheet says it should be capable of 42MB/s. Sure looks like it’s clipped at 33 though.
The true performance story, of course, has little to do with max sustained transfer speeds; seek time and bursts tend to dominate performance. Still, with a SATA controller and a reasonably fast hard drive in my laptop, I’m curious to know what’s up. The inescapable truth here is that it’s going to take 2x the amount of time to back up my iTunes repository that it should, or to copy VM’s around, which annoys me.
And that is why you must always go for the hard drives with an RPM count listed when you buying a laptop. Got burned by that once; never again…
Drive speeds are a constant annoyance for me. I’ve got several systems, all with at least 2 GB of RAM and a decent processor. The Hard Drive always slows me down. I’ve gotten High RPM drives (never the 15,000 SCSI 3 drives for me personally, but 10,000 RPM is within my reach).
Some day, I will not be counting the seconds while my drives kick in.
Hi,
I have a Compaq desktop with Celeron(R) D CPU 3.20GHz and 1.5G of RAM. Even when I’m not running a lot of programs, my CPU usage ranges from 85% – 100%, often freezing some programs and making me “end task.” When looking at the Performance tab in Task Manager, it’s usually:
CPU Usage: 85% – 100%
PF Usage: 659MB
Totals: Handles(19198), Threads(688), Processes(68)
Physical Memory(K): Total(1505772), Available(383228), System Cache(410188)
Commit Charge(K): Total(675344), Limit(3447144), Peak(838464)
Kernel Memory(K): Total(110192), Paged(85356), Nonpaged(24832)
I’m just listing all the nmbers because I am not sure what’s relevent. I’m just getting a bit frustrated since Compaq made me buy extra RAM to fix the problem, which didn’t help at all. Could you help? Thanks, Bob Terner.
Interesting that you’re using a Mac, being a Windows dev. What is the exact setup – Windows running with BootCamp, or outright OSX with Parallels?
I use OSX and Parallels. I’ve been running Vista since RC2 on and off, and since RTM as my main dev VM. Computer is a 17″ MacBook Pro w/ 2G RAM. The internal hard drive is slow, but the firewire drive I blogged about earlier is a great solution to that problem from a VM perspective.
Bob: I can’t really diagnose your computer from here; I’d guess that you have a misbehaving program. 1.5G ought to be enough for most things, but it totally depends on precisely what you’re trying to do.
I’d go back to Compaq tech support and get yourself escalated to level 2 support to find someone with a clue. Best of luck.