[zerostar]

I have 2 drives, my old boot drive and a new drive I just cloned from my boot drive. the new one is lager (I will lay out all the specs below) but I am unsure which to keep, I'd like to keep the 500G as my boot but the write speed on the smaller drive is quite a bit quicker... (they both have the same amount of data on them) what would you do from a strictly speed perspective.


This is my old drive a 300GB Maxtor MaxLine III


This is a new drive, the 500GB Seagate 7200.10

[Big Mac]

Keep the smaller as your boot drive and the larger as a backup?

[zerostar]

I have a 1TB 7200.11 Seagate as my backup drive That is FAST I would use it as my boot drive but I like to have all my stuff (Movies, music, video editing) on the 2nd usually.

[reader50]

The Maxtor is making effective use of cache on write (write-behind), while the Seagate appears to not be using cache on write at all. This makes me think the Seagate needs to have it's performance settings changed, to enable write-behind. Then retest the drives.

If you want to find the base write speed, retest with a big file, big enough to overload the 16? MB cache on the Maxtor. Retest with a 500 MB file, and compare the "real" write speeds.

I like Maxtors myself, at least the ones right before Seagate bought them. But the Maxtor used is older today, the Seagate ought to be faster. If you can change the performance setting (in a PC maybe), then an honest retest is likely to put the Seagate write speed into comparable territory, if not higher.

[zerostar]

Hmm. I am pretty sure they are both 16MB Cache drives, any way to enable the cache on write in the Mac?

[zerostar]

Here is a more extended test...

Maxtor


and

The Seagate

[reader50]

Looks to me like the Maxtor really is a bit faster on write, possibly because the Seagate uses the perpendicular recording, which may take longer.

No idea, but HD tweak utilities seldom get released on the Mac. Like that setting on Hitachi drives that switches between Performance and Quiet settings.

[zerostar]

Do you think a faster boot drive would make a big difference? Basically I can fit 2 drives IN my machine on the fast SATA bus, so either I can do one of the 2 above as the boot + my 1TB as the "dump stuff on drive" or I could do the 1TB as my boot since it is so much faster (damn near 100MB on read/write) and use the 500GB as the backup & dump everything else on the boot, plus I would have my 300GB in a firewire case.

OR would it be smarter to do the 300 as the boot and put the 500 in the case? or 500 as boot and 300 in case? What would you do?

This is my Terabyte drive: (the seagate 7200.11)
One Terabyte SATA hard drives -- which is fastest?

[reader50]

Assuming this is a G5 like mine, I put my biggest 3 drives inside, and bump the next biggest to a FW case. This assumes later drives are both bigger *and* faster. Your case is a bit odd, unless you can change the performance setting on the Seagate 500. In which case it's write speed would essentially equal the Maxtor's.

Since you only have 3 drives, why not put them all inside? You'd need a cheap SATA -> PATA adapter board, and an IDE cable. This would let you put off the 'bump' decision until you buy the 2 TB drive next year.

[zerostar]

Wow I never knew that and thanks for all the research! I think I will do all 3 inside, The more I thought about it I was thinking the 1TB would be good for my boot because with my Apple TV I need to load alot of video into iTunes, I know you can move the library to another drive but I like it on the main and ill just exclude that from backup.... I finally got to testing the 1TB on the internal SATA and here are the results:

This is a 1TB 7200.11 Seagate about 400GB Full


p.s. I think my next purchase would be a MacPro since a 2TB drive would probably cost like half, at least those you can put 4 drives in, maybe YOU could even get 6 :-)