I'm a big fan of these new WD Raptor 10k rpm SATA drives that have been out for a little while now. So far they've been really solid and they make quite the difference in IO speed. I just replaced a drive in a machine and had a chance to perform a little real world test on identical machines hardware wise except the drive.

Machine A has a Seagate 7200rpm SATA drive (ST380013AS)
Machine B has a Western Digitial 10k rpm 36gig Raptor (WD360ADFD-00)

Both machines are AMD64 3000+ w/1gig of ram (identical mainboards/ram/controllers and whatnot)

First I did a little test with apt-get. Both machines are running Debian Etch and had an identical upgrade to do on firefox (or iceweasel). First I downloaded the packages to make sure they were starting from the same place:
apt-get -d install mozilla-firefox

Next I ran the install and timed them both:
time apt-get -y install mozilla-firefox

For the older seagate drive the time was 22.6 seconds:
real 0m22.571s
user 0m2.956s
sys 0m1.032s


For the 10k WD Raptor it was done in 5.4 seconds:
real 0m5.363s
user 0m1.332s
sys 0m0.496s


If you have the money I'd certainly recommend the Raptor drives as they really do make quite a noticeable difference in anything IO related.

posted at: 15:59 | path: /general | permanent link to this entry