I did some unscientific tests this morning on hard drive file transfer speeds. I simply used a stopwatch to time from selecting copy till the copy window closed. I found some of the results very interesting.
Hardware: Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-K8N Ultra-9 Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra Both SATA RAIDs are connected via Nvidia SATA II RAID connectors SATA I: Two 37GB WD Raptors (10,000 rpm) drives in RAID 0 SATA II: Two T7K250 250GB Hitachi SATA II w/ncq (7200 rpm) drives in RAID 0 ATA100: Seagate Barracude ATA with 8MB cache File Size 355 MB 2575.5 MB >From To sec sec SATA II SATA I 4.5 78.9 MB/s 36.5 70.6 MB/s SATA I SATA II 5.8 61.2 MB/s 38.2 67.4 MB/s SATA II ATA100 6.5 54.6 MB/s 41.6 61.9 MB/s SATA I ATA100 6.5 54.6 MB/s 44.8 57.5 MB/s ATA100 SATA II 8.0 44.4 MB/s 41.0 62.8 MB/s ATA100 SATA I 8.5 41.8 MB/s 44.3 58.1 MB/s Same disk transfers (partition to partition on same physical drive) SATA I SATA I 13.5 26.3 MB/s 124.8 20.6 MB/s SATA II SATA II 15.0 23.7 MB/s 110.5 23.3 MB/s ATA100 ATA100 16.5 21.5 MB/s 119.4 21.6 MB/s I thought the 10000rpm Raptors would be faster than the 7200 rpm Hitachi drives with transfers to/from the ATA100 drive (the only "equal" starting point I have). I was also surprised at how slow intra-drive transfers were. Now I have to re-think my "use the Raptors for the OS" philosophy. And at the price of the a Raptor, you can purchase the 250 GB Hitachi. Seems like a no brainer -- 37 GB slower vs 250 GB faster? (in my defense, I purchased the Raptors almost 2 years ago, before SATA II was even available). Just an FYI, but thoughts and comments always welcome. Jim Maki [EMAIL PROTECTED]
