Seagate 1.5 Tb Mod – Part 2
Some time has now passed since the we first introduced a way to sort of “hack” your hard drive into delivering faster than normal performance. Since then there we have been asked many questions and recieved many requests for further testing of the hard drive. Here is a snippet of some of the questions that I will be answering:
What would happen if I were to just partition the hard drives instead of “cropping” them?
Can I set up different LBA numbers to and get the same performance?
Why even bother getting this hard drive if the Raptor one has lower seek times?
and the most important one of all:
What would the performance be like if I were to RAID two of these hard drives?
These questions among others will be answered as we put the Seagate 7200.11 under further testing and scrutiny.
Now that we know what exactly we are going to be looking for in our tests lets move on to what some readers have been asking since this article has been published.
Partitioning vs Clipping?
Some of the users suggested that formatting the drive into 2 partitions would generate the same effect as the method described in the previous article. To find out if this was truth or fiction I decided to find out in a very simple test. First I reverted the drive to its original size and then used Widows 7′ s partitioning tool to create 2 partitions one of the partitions was a 300 GB partition while the other was designated for the remaining space. Interestingly enough, the benchmarking software does not recognize logical partitions. Thereby I arrived at the following conclusion: while theoretically it is possible to partition the drive in such a way that the faster outer edges of the drive would be used with the smaller partition for faster access rates and the slower, inside for the storage, this arrangement would be largely impractical.
If I were to take your average gamer and use his/her rig as an example the following scenario would be presented. The user will be able to experience quicker boot times, however, anytime he/she would try to install a new game, the directory of which resides on the slower part of the drive, the effect would be cascaded into the faster parts of the drive since both sections are on the same platter and there is only one spindle..
That’s retarded. What the heck is this “cascaded effect” mumbo jumbo? The fast partition will indeed be just as fast as your brilliant, mostly incapacitated drive, and the second partition is simply space that you would not have with the incapacitated drive. If you use if for something, it actually does something. If you can’t use it, well, it’s utterly useless. Duh. If you have someplace else to put your games, that will give you better performance, wonderful, no harm done. If you don’t have someplace else to put your game, guess what? You can either use the partition you seem to prefer to simply toss away, or indeed toss it away and just make do without your game. Gawd, I’ve heard some bone-headed ideas in my time…this one’s right up there with the boniest of em.