[MacBook/P] 7200rpm Drive Results?

[Abulia]

Hi there. My friend and I both got shiny new MacBooks and upgraded the internal (stock) 5400rpm drives to the 7200rpm Hitachi drives. They sure do seem faster but Xbench says otherwise.

With my stock 5400rpm drive I consistantly got a Disk Test result of 34.00.

With our new drives our best results are <30, between 27 and 29!

I have the Seagate on order and will be testing it tomorrow, but if anyone has a MB or MBP with a 7200rpm drive (any kind) could you please post your Xbench Disk Test results along with make/model? It'd be appreciated.

Right now I'm wondering if the Hitachi has NCQ enabled by default, which I don't believe the MB/P support. Anyone know?

[Edit] See post #5 for some more info on NCQ and SSC support/impact on Mac machines.

Thanks!

 

[faintember]

Ok, here are my Xbench Disk Test results:

MB with stock 60GB 5400rpm HD, 512mb ram: 27.83
MB with Hitachi 100GB 7200rpm HD, 2GB ram: 28.52-29.11
1GHz TiPB Hitachi 100GB 5400rpm HD, 1GB ram: 36.80
(side note: the TiPB and MB 7200rpm both have the same amount of space used, just under 60GB)

On the MB 7200rpm setup, the numbers that drop my score are the Random Uncached Write [4k blocks].

What is the NQC that you mention?

Either way, i have a feeling that Xbench blows even more on the Intel machines. My TiPB overall score was 37.29, compared to my MB (stock) at 54.62 and the MB 7200rpm/2GB at 56.81.

 

[Abulia]

What is the NCQ that you mention?

Native Command Queuing. I read on xlr8yourmac that NCQ wasn't supported on some Macs. I don't know if that includes the MacBook.

Or, maybe it was SSC? (Spread Spectrum Clocking)

Gah, more research to be done!

Either way, i have a feeling that Xbench blows even more on the Intel machines. My TiPB overall score was 37.29, compared to my MB (stock) at 54.62 and the MB 7200rpm/2GB at 56.81.

Well, your results in Xbench show a speed decrease going from the 5400 to the 7200. I'm not saying there's a problem -- perhaps Xbench is the problem -- but that's a bit worrying and in line with our findings.

 

[faintember]

Thanks for the info on NCQ. I tried a quick google search but didnt find much of anything.

but that's a bit worrying and in line with our findings.

It is strange. In real life performance, things seem a little bit faster, and rosetta performance with my audio apps is improved, so it seems to have made an improvement in spite of the Xbench results.

Hopefully we get some more posters with data so we can make more comparisons. If not, we may want to point the folks at Xbench to this thread.

Interesting review at xlr8yourmac. Also this review at Toms Hardware. We should be seeing faster times....

 

[Abulia]

I did some more digging on NQC and SSC and the Macs.

NQC isn't a problem; if a SATA controller doesn't support NQC then nothing bad happens. No harm, no foul. I don't know if Mac SATA controllers support NQC.

SSC is another story. Macs -- at the least the G5 PowerMacs -- don't support SSC and that will cause the machine to not see the drive. SSC has to be disabled using software, typically by hooking the drive up to a Windows box. Most drives are shipping with SSC turned off by default, apparently.

So, if the drive works, SSC isn't the problem and no word on if the Mac SATA controllers support NQC. (Again, more research to be done.)

 

[Abulia]

Oh, and here are my results of the Disk Test with my stock 5400rpm drive. I ran each test three times and averaged the results. Each set is with a different memory configuration in my MB.

MB 2.0GHz, 512MB / 36.09
MB 2.0GHz 1GB / 35.83
MB 2.0GHz 1.25GB / 35.34
MB 2.0GHz 2GB / 34.32

[Edit] This was on AC power, highest performance, with "Put the hard disk to sleep" off. Spotlight not currently indexing.

 

[faintember]

Interesting that your scores with the stock HD were all higher than my scores with my stock HD, all other things even.....

 

[risc]

Barefeats have tested 5400 RPM versus 7200 RPM drives here: http://barefeats.com/5472.html

 

[Abulia]

Interesting review at xlr8yourmac. Also this review at Toms Hardware. We should be seeing faster times....

No doubt. Just comparing the xlr8yourmac benchmarks against my stock 5400rpm drive, my drive equals or beats the 7200rpm drive in every test.

Random Uncached Read
7200rpm 16.66 MB/sec
5400rpm 16.98 MB/sec

Random Uncached Write
7200rpm 21.04 MB/sec
5400rpm 21.55 MB/sec

Sequential Uncached Read
7200rpm 34.67 MB/sec
5400rpm 34.95 MB/sec

Sequential Uncached Write
7200rpm 30.14 MB/sec
5400rpm 29.54 MB/sec

Am I crazy or is something wrong here?

 

[faintember]

I dont think you are crazy; i do think there is something wrong with Xbench.....I am heading to that site now to see what i can dig up.

Here are some MB benchmarks from over at Xbench: 1 2 3. All their numbers seem to be around ours.

Oh, and other complaints about low disk scores.

 

[risc]

I do think there is something wrong with Xbench

Xbench is completely broken on my Power Mac G5 my OpenGL scores went DOWN when I moved from an ATI Radeon 9800 XT to a NVIDIA 6800 Ultra DDL. My drive scores also went down when I moved from a 7200 RPM drive to a 10000 RPM WD Raptor.

 

[Abulia]

So is there another test suite that we can run on the Mac side? I'm not crazy about Xbench either, but I don't know enough about it to call its results "foul."

I suppose I could run the tests from the Windows side, but that only helps me (w/ Boot Camp installed); not sure if anyone else want to give that a shot.

 

[faintember]

No Bootcamp here....i have noooo use for windows.
But in my last post, i did some editing....It seems like others are complaining about low disk scores as well....

 

[risc]

Quoting barefeats from my link above:

The 7200rpm internal drive is NOT significantly faster than the stock 5400rpm when doing small RANDOM reads and writes. That implies that it won't give you much advantage for booting and normal operations.

If you work on audio or video where large blocks are captured or played back, the 7200rpm internal drive of the MacBook has a clear advantage over the stock 5400rpm internal drive

 

[Pressure]

Interesting review at xlr8yourmac. Also this review at Toms Hardware. We should be seeing faster times....

Those reviews are age old, I wouldn't look at them. Here is a more recent one.

Check it out here.

It includes the following harddrives:

Seagate 4200.2
Seagate 5400.2
Seagate 5400.3
Seagate 7200.1
Hitachi 4K120
Hitachi 5K100
Hitachi 7K100
Hitachi 7K60
Toshiba MK1032GAX
Toshiba MK8032GAX
Fujitsu MHV2100AH
Fujitsu MHV2120AV
Western Digital WD800VE

So it should include most of the laptop harddrives out there

 

[faintember]

Those reviews are age old, I wouldn't look at them. Here is a more recent one.

Check it out here

All that link gives me is a review of a segate 160GB 5400rpm drive. And the age of a review, in this case does not make it bad, or have any less valuable information.

 

[Abulia]

All that link gives me is a review of a segate 160GB 5400rpm drive. And the age of a review, in this case does not make it bad, or have any less valuable information.

They do have a 2.5" drive roundup article with the drives in question, though. Here.

So let's assume that Xbench is boinked in regards to benchmarking drive speed/performance. What else can we use to prove that the 7200rpm drives are, in fact, providing superior performance?

 

[risc]

What else can we use to prove that the 7200rpm drives are, in fact, providing superior performance?

Larger files! Why not read the information on barefeats rather than using a broken benchmarking app?

 

[faintember]

They do have a 2.5" drive roundup article with the drives in question, though. Here.

Gotta love the correct link!!!! lol

To test, we should use the same application, doing the same process, with a file size over 100mb? Sounds reasonable to me, but getting equal results across the board may be difficult...any suggestions?

 

[Abulia]

Well, there's at least 3 other people who have upgraded their MB/Ps w/ 7200rpm drives and I've pointed this thread out to them. Let's see their Xbench results for comparision purposes. If we're all getting the same crappy results then it's likely Xbench is the culprit.

 

[Pressure]

All that link gives me is a review of a segate 160GB 5400rpm drive. And the age of a review, in this case does not make it bad, or have any less valuable information.

Indeed but they are comparing all those drives to the Seagate Momentus 5400.3 ...

 

[faintember]

Indeed but they are comparing all those drives to the Seagate Momentus 5400.3 ...

and.....
anyways i think we have enough results from over the web to prove that the 7200rpm drive should be faster, especially with larger file sizes. We were just looking for that proof, to show that Xbench is totally borked.

 

[Abulia]

BTW, while we're waiting...

...partly the reason I started this thread is because the Hitachi drive that I just returned I *think* was busted. Installing OS X took over 45 minutes and my MB heated up so bad that it locked up during the install process! Then, after getting into OS X, I ran Xbench and imagine my surprise as my Drive Test results took a nose dive. After confering with a friend who also has the Hitachi, he was surprised (and depressed) see his own sub-par Xbench results. We checked out the Xbench DB and saw several "stock" black MacBooks getting far better results with their 5400rpm drives.

Hence the quest to determine if drive performance on the MB is correct or if Xbench is just screwy.

In any event I returned my Hitachi for a Seagate. So I'll run some tests on it when it shows.

 

[macenforcer]

Put the seagate 100gb 7200 in mine. Whoa! It feels really fast now. Hitachi is a little faster but less warranty, and loud. Its up to you. Case is not even the slightest bit warm near drive.

 

[Abulia]

Put the seagate 100gb 7200 in mine. Whoa! It feels really fast now. Hitachi is a little faster but less warranty, and loud. Its up to you. Case is not even the slightest bit warm near drive.

Could you please run some Xbench tests (see link in post #1) and share the results?

Thanks!