Mike Trello's Blog

Hard drive ratings
As an addendum to the PassMark CPU Benchmark post, I decided to go back and look up the ratings of my home drives currently in service, to see how they compare to one another. Not wanting to spend too much time locating all the drive models, I only included the drives ordered through Newegg (purchase history is so useful!). PassMark has a nice look-up page to make hunting for your specific model(s) a quick process.

The results, shown below, were interesting.

I have always been pleased with the speed, quietness and cool running of the WD640 Blue drives. I have two running in my primary machine and one in the ESXi server, and have never heard them running over the case fans. But I was pleasantly surprised at how much better performance the Samsung F3 provided. 872 versus 626 is a very significant 40% difference. I had already more or less decided the next ESXi drive to be added would be another F3 and this only bolstered that decision. The SSDs that are all the rage these days for boot drives started at about that point and worked their way up to scores around 1700. Of course, their capacity is much less and cost much, much more than the $70 I spent on the F3.

Temperature Readings
While we are talking hard drives, I’ll also mention the temperature readings of the non-ESXi drives.  I used System Information for Windows by Gabriel Topala, an excellent application that will get a future post dedicated to it. The two Western Digital 640’s in my primary box read 95° and 96° Fahrenheit respectively. The backup machine houses three Seagates and the Samsung green drive. The Seagates read between 107° and 109°. The green, not surprisingly, was a cooler 86° despite it being within one slot of the other drives.

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