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HDTach 2.61
Contributor : Gregory Peng
Hard Disk Model : Maxtor DiamondMax 96147U8
Size : 60.4GB
Transfer mode : ATA/100
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Off |
Fast |
Quiet |
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Random Access Time (ms) |
11.5 |
11.3 |
13.3 |
| The
Quiet mode's seek speed is at least 2ms or 17.7%
or slower than the Fast mode.
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Off |
Fast |
Quiet |
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Read Burst Speed (MB/s) |
59.0 |
59.1 |
59.1 |
| No
perceptible change in burst transfer rate here.
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Contributor : Jon Ferraez
Hard Disk Model : Maxtor DiamondMax 45
Size : 20GB
Transfer mode : ATA/100
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Off |
Fast |
Quiet |
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Random Access Time (ms) |
10.6 |
10.5 |
14.2 |
| The
difference is rather large here. The Quiet mode is
now an amazing 3.7ms or 35.2% slower than
the Fast mode!
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Off |
Fast |
Quiet |
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Read Burst Speed (MB/s) |
30.6 |
30.6 |
30.6 |
| No
difference in the burst transfer rate here either...
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Contributor : Jon Ferraez
Hard Disk Model : Maxtor DiamondMax 40
Size : 30GB
Transfer mode : ATA/100
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Off |
Fast |
Quiet |
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Random Access Time (ms) |
11.7 |
11.7 |
12.2 |
| The
difference is surprisingly small here. The Quiet
mode is now only 0.5ms or 4.3% slower than
the Fast mode.
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Off |
Fast |
Quiet |
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Read Burst Speed (MB/s) |
30.7 |
30.6 |
30.6 |
| No
difference in the burst transfer rate here either...
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Dissection
As you can see, Silent Store affects only the seek
performance of the drive. In all three modes, the burst transfer
rate was not affected at all.
On the other hand, the seek speed was greatly influenced by
the Silent Store mode. According to Maxtor when the Silent Store
mode is set to Quiet, Silent Store reduces the hard disk
seek performance by approximately 8%. However, the
benchmarks show that the performance deterioration can be as
great as 35.2%! In fact, the average performance
deterioration from the independent benchmark results of three
different hard disks came to be about 18.5%. That's a lot
more than Maxtor admitted. :)
For most users, even a minor drop in seek performance is
unacceptable. After all, people buy DiamondMax drives for
their high performance. So, most, if not all, of you will want
to change Maxtor's default Silent Store mode to a faster mode or
just disable Silent Store. How do we go about that?
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