As mentioned to me in the comments under the Tech Tips video we did on the Corsair S128 SSD hard drive, the drive does NOT read at 150MB/s sustained and the reason for the WAY out of spec performance numbers is that the drive had not yet been fully formatted. That’s my mistake and when I did some follow up testing, it read at a normal ~90MB/s….. Or so I thought.

Enter the X25-M, on which we have a Tech Tips coming out shortly. I was doing some testing with this drive, moving files from the Corsair SSD to a RAID-0 array with two X25-M 80GB drives, and I observed the transfer speeds you see above. They were verified using the good ‘ol fashioned “calculator + file size + stop watch” method and it looks the drive will actually read at about 120MB/s, but only if you’re doing more than one concurrent read. Transferring just one file (as you can see) will cap at 90MB/s. Still not the 150MB/s I originally reported, but it’s better than spec by a long shot…

Phenom II is a lot of things. Performance leader is not one of them. What it is though, is a return to value and competition with Intel’s mid-range at stock, and competition with Intel’s high end when overclocked.

The Phenom II really reminds me of the Barton core. It’s not the fastest, but it’s fast enough at the right price. I did some quick & dirty benchmarks of the Phenom II 940 Black against Intel’s latest and greatest Intel Core i7 just to get a point of reference for cost to performance. Forgive my fail Excel graphs…

So basically with a little bit of overclocking, enthusiasts can get about 90% of the performance of a Core i7 Extreme 965 for a fraction of the cost. Sure you can do it on the Intel side too, but at least AMD is an option again.

Well I decided to do some follow up performance numbers that include more drives as well as RAID-0 results with the Seagate 7200.2 drives, and the long and short of it is that I will be replacing my Samsung F1 with a pair of Seagate 7200.2s when I do my next reformat.

The performance difference is not staggering, but when combined with the reduced noise, reduced power consumption and reduced footprint (I”ll be sticking the 2.5″ drives to the back of my motherboard with industrial velcro), it’s an easy decision to make.

Here are some comparisons to some other drives that I found interesting. The mobile drive’s performance looks quite disappointing in direct comparison to the F1 750GB, but when compared to a more equivalent drive (Seagate 7200.10 160GB) it’s a closer fight.

I couldn’t help noticing that all solid state drives are coming out in 2.5″ and smaller form factors, so it got me thinking that it’s only a matter of time before a high end gaming chassis is full of 2.5″ mounts rather than 3.5″ ones.

Obviously SSD isn’t quite there yet, but even 2.5″ magnetic drives seem to compare pretty favorably to 3.5″ desktop drives. They’re quieter, smaller (duh), and with the 7200RPM spindle speeds, the assumption is that the speed is pretty close. They also dump less heat into your precious case, which means less airflow is necessary and again less noise.

I managed to get my hands on a 160GB Seagate Momentus 7200.2 and a Samsung F1 750GB in a real David & Goliath battle. I’ve only run a couple benchmarks for now because I want to get into RAID performance, which I think is really important because as they’ve discovered in servers, you can fit several times more 2.5″ drives in the same space.

Seagate Momentus 7200.2 160GB 2.5″ “Notebook” Hard Drive

Samsung F1 750GB 7200RPM 3.5″ Desktop Hard Drive

I guess my results weren’t that impressive, but it’s important to notice that as far as the access times go, the drives were actually very close. That’s important for multi-tasking, as well as for quick access to small files. It’s not that often you’re actually going to need the full read and write bandwidth of your drive in a typical desktop scenario, but that obviously doesn’t apply to I/O intensive operations like video editing or systems with limited system RAM that are using the swap file all the time.

Hoping to do a follow up shortly with RAID-0 performance for the 2.5″ competitor.