I got one of these drives for a customer as an upgrade for his laptop. Before I give it to him, I decided to test it on an older desktop to see what it did for performance. This is one of the hybrid drives - spinning platters + 8GB flash.
Test summary.
1. Older HP desktop computer (Pavilion a1310n)
2. XP SP3 with 2GB RAM
3. Original/Source/Cloned hard drive: Western Digital WD2000JD (200GB SATA, 7200 rpm)
4. Cloning software - Bootable CD of Seagate Disc Wizard
The cloning went well and as part of the cloning, Disc Wizard aligns the hard drive partitions to be compatible with this Advanced Format drive (4K sectors).
I tested boot time on the original hard drive and then on the cloned new drive. How did I determine boot time? I put NOTEPAD.exe in the startup group. I used a stopwatch - pressed the power button, started the stopwatch and when notepad launched, I stopped the stopwatch.
Old hard drive boot time: 45 seconds consistently
New hard drive boot time (first, second, third, fourth): 1. 43 sec 2. 33 sec 3. 33 sec 4. 33 sec
So, you see that after the first boot, the drive learned (cached) enough of the operating system to improve boot time by about 10 seconds. Actually 7 seconds of that time was the PC doing its POST, but that doesn't really matter because it's 7 seconds regardless of the hard drive. Performance once booted seems more sprightly and if you do the same activities all the time (browser, Outlook, etc.) it should speed up launching programs.
Other thoughts:
1. This motherboard doesn't support 6Gb/s speeds so a better board would probably see better results. As a matter of fact, it looks like both the mobo and hard drive are only capable of 1.5GB/s SATA speed so this isn't the ideal test rig but it was all I had to work with.
2. I'll post results of how it works in the laptop when I do that clone. The laptop supports 3GB/s SATA.
3. Yes, I had extra time on my hands today!
Test summary.
1. Older HP desktop computer (Pavilion a1310n)
2. XP SP3 with 2GB RAM
3. Original/Source/Cloned hard drive: Western Digital WD2000JD (200GB SATA, 7200 rpm)
4. Cloning software - Bootable CD of Seagate Disc Wizard
The cloning went well and as part of the cloning, Disc Wizard aligns the hard drive partitions to be compatible with this Advanced Format drive (4K sectors).
I tested boot time on the original hard drive and then on the cloned new drive. How did I determine boot time? I put NOTEPAD.exe in the startup group. I used a stopwatch - pressed the power button, started the stopwatch and when notepad launched, I stopped the stopwatch.
Old hard drive boot time: 45 seconds consistently
New hard drive boot time (first, second, third, fourth): 1. 43 sec 2. 33 sec 3. 33 sec 4. 33 sec
So, you see that after the first boot, the drive learned (cached) enough of the operating system to improve boot time by about 10 seconds. Actually 7 seconds of that time was the PC doing its POST, but that doesn't really matter because it's 7 seconds regardless of the hard drive. Performance once booted seems more sprightly and if you do the same activities all the time (browser, Outlook, etc.) it should speed up launching programs.
Other thoughts:
1. This motherboard doesn't support 6Gb/s speeds so a better board would probably see better results. As a matter of fact, it looks like both the mobo and hard drive are only capable of 1.5GB/s SATA speed so this isn't the ideal test rig but it was all I had to work with.
2. I'll post results of how it works in the laptop when I do that clone. The laptop supports 3GB/s SATA.
3. Yes, I had extra time on my hands today!
