Slow Stock Hard Drives

[Thiol]

Hi all,

I'm trying to figure out is those articles about the slow Seagate 320 stock hard drives are true... Would others be willing to compare xbench numbers? Mine, on a 4-core 2.8 Mac Pro, is below. Are these numbers really slower than other 320 GB drives?

Thanks!

 

[aibo]

pretty glad mine shipped with a 320GB western digital instead. i read the macworld review stating the seagate drive was slow. here's mine:

 

[Infrared]

Hi all,

I'm trying to figure out is those articles about the slow Seagate 320 stock hard drives are true... Would others be willing to compare xbench numbers? Mine, on a 4-core 2.8 Mac Pro, is below. Are these numbers really slower than other 320 GB drives?

Thanks!

Another WD 320GB:

 

[Mitthrawnuruodo]

Suddenly my relatively new 2.5" 320GB@5400 WD disk in my old MacBook doesn't seem that bad:

 

[Thiol]

OK, based on this sample size, does this mean that the main difference between the WD and Seagate stock 320s is the random uncached write speed?

The silly follow up question is, how much of my normal processes fall under that category?

 

[Wild-Bill]

They ship all the 320 drives with only an 8-meg cache. Most, if not all drives today typically come with a 16 meg cache. Apple is just trying to cut corners wherever it can. I suspect they have a nice deal with the OEMs to offload these 8-meg cache drives for them. Heck, even the newer high-capacity drives are now sporting 32-meg caches in some cases.

Frankly, I find it insulting that a machine of this caliber ships with a paltry 8-meg cache drive as stock. That is why it is no longer in my Mac Pro.

 

[fridgeymonster3]

I was a little fed up with the stock WD 320 drive, so I installed a Samsung F1 750 which has much better numbers