HD benchmarks of my SATA-modded T43p - large picture warning

[ajkula66]

Well, yeah...I just had to do it...

Courtesy of my dear friend and fellow forum member RealBlackStuff, I'm now a happy owner of a SATA-modded T43p.

This machine started its life as a 2668-VQ7, identical to the one I have in my signature, including the U.S. build tag.

The first picture shows a standard, IBM/Lenovo-issued Hitachi 60GB/7200rpm PATA drive in my "stock" VQ7 unit:



The second one is a Lenovo-issued Seagate 320GB/7200rpm SATA in the "modded" VQ7:



Two things to bear in mind here:

a) The machines are identical apart from the hard drives and the mod itself - CPUs, RAM, all nine yards - even the wireless cards.

b) Both of the drives tested are well-used, but with no errors displayed during the testing. None was "tweaked" to enhance performance whatsoever. Both drives have a factory image of XP Pro on them.

The difference in HD transfer speeds is felt instantly, that's all I can say.

One of these days when I'm less swamped, I'll wipe both of these and try to tweak them as much as I can for optimum test results, but this is it for now.

Stay tuned...

[lukee]

Nice benchmark. Interesting are values of Access Time, Burst Rate and CPU usage. About Access Time I guess that it's higher on a newer drive because old 7200rpm HDD has less of space to browse. Burst rate means how fast is the transfer from ATA controller to a HDD cache - I guess the old Travelstar is faster maybe because of some special settings in original HDD firmware. Last value - CPU Usage - is most significant on T43/p because this machine has CPU with only 1 core and without hyperthreading technology. If I am starting from a premise that fastest ATA 2.5" HDD is Samsung HM160HC with avg. continual read ~50 MB/s and your Seagate has this value only about 12 MB/s higher, then I am asking myself if I would be readiness to sacrifice 11% of CPU power for about 12MB/s of HDD speed... I would say 'no'. But congratulations to you with the SATA mod! Can somebody perform the same test with Hitachi 7K500?

[ajkula66]

CPU usage is a really debatable aspect...

Cleaned the load, eliminated some of the stuff and got the usage barely above 6% on the modded machine...

Will be playing a bit more in the next few days and posting the results accordingly.

Stay tuned...