Did you know that your actual hard disk performance under Windows is determined not only by the speed of your harddrive (as measured by most disk benchmarks) but also by factors such as the mainboard chipset, UDMA/PIO mode, RAID configuration, CPU speed, RAM size and the quality of drivers? That’s true… It doesn’t mean that if you have a 7200RPM SATA hard drive, you will get the same hard disk performance as your friend who is also using a 7200RPM SATA hard drive but on a more powerful computer.

how to calculate hard drive performanceI knew about this logic all this while but never really put my desktop and laptop to the test. My desktop computer is quite a powerful one compared to my laptop but I was surprised to get better benchmark results for my laptop!

Before I show you the results of my hard disk drive benchmark and also the tools that I use, here is my desktop and laptop hardware configuration.

Laptop
- Intel Pentium M 1.73GHz (533MHz FSB, 2MB L2 cache)
- Intel 915PM Chipset
- 2GB DDR2-533MHz Memory (Dual Channel)
- 54000 RPM (IDE)

Desktop
- Intel Pentium D 2.8GHz (800MHz 1MB L2 cache)
- Intel 945P Chipset
- 1GB DDR2-667MHz Memory (Single Channel)
- 7200 RPM (SATA)

DiskTT simply tries to give you an indication of the amount of Megabytes per second read and write speed you get under your normal Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/XP environment. DiskTT measures a disk’s throughput under 32-bit windows using Windows core read and write functions. DiskTT is small, free and portable. I’ve set the test file size as 1024MB.

Laptop hard drive performance with DiskTT.
laptop

Desktop hard drive performance with DiskTT.
desktop

As you can see, the 5400RPM hard drive on my laptop performs much better than my 7200RPM desktop hard drive. At first I didn’t believe because I always thought that my desktop is more powerful and faster than my laptop. So I copied an AVI movie file to both laptop and desktop. Then I manually copy the movie file to another location. My laptop was able to finish copying the file in half the time compared to my desktop. Is RAM really that important in hard disk performance? Please share with me your hard drive benchmark test results. Remember to set the size of test file to 1024MB.

[ Download Disk Throughput Tester ]

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