CrystalDiskMark HDD score

[TrainFan475]

Typical score for a 7200rpm hard drive?

 

[Lurick]

Looks about right to me from what I used to get on a single drive.

[Kedohawyr]

Yes, those scores are perfectly normal for that kind of drive.

 

I'm assuming you were under the impression that 7200rpm was "fast" (or is it feeling slower now in which case go to the very end of my post for advance) which was only ever true when compared to 5400rpm drives and even then the margin was not only small but highly dependent on the drive's density. To illustrate my point here is the same benchmark which I just ran on my 5400rpm* 4TB WD Red drive.

 

WD Red 4TB

 

You can see that despite being a "slower" drive it is unquestionably faster and that's because of data density**. A HDD works by spinning a platter and reading the data as it passes by a sensor positioned at a specific track. Spinning the platter faster (7200 rotations per minute instead of 5400 rotations per minute) means you can read more data in the same amount of time but you can also achieve this by increasing how much data is available to be read in a single rotation.

 

Of course the speed difference between my drive and your drive is actually irrelevant. I'd argue that today any question about the "fastest" harddrive is meaningless because they're all slow, it's like picking the fastest snail. Cheap SSDs fundamentally change the game. You might look at NVME SSDs and drool over the 3500MB/s sequential figures but those will rarely appear in day to day use unless you work on raw 4k video. The numbers that really make a difference are the 'random' read and write figures. These show how quickly the drive can get more normal sized chunks of data that are needed by applications and today even cheap SATA SSDs are running at a whole other level compared to harddrives.

 

WD Blue 3D 500GB

 

Because of their mechanical nature harddrives have to physically position a sensor at the correct track before they can read a chunk of data. This takes over 1/100 of a second which is forever to a computer. Solid state SSDs are just fundamentally faster because of this. You can see above that the basic SATA SSD I've got is about 3 times faster for sequential reads and writes. That sounds nice but it's nothing compared to the difference in speed for real world use when your computer is looking around for different bits of data (random reads and writes). For single tasks this SATA SSD is running 50-70 times faster than my 4TB HDD (38.9MB/s vs 0.55 MB/s) and when you start taking advantage of a queue (such as when multiple threads or background services like anti-virus are running) the SSD can go over 200 times faster.

 

* the exact speed is unstated as WD hides it behind the "Intellipower" label. This way instead of having to make all drives in a range exactly 5400rpm they can have them tuned to the optimal speed for that platter arrangement (so the 3TB model with 3 platters may have a slightly different speed than the 2TB model with 2 platters).

** also I suspect you've got some fragmentation with your drive 77% full which slows it down slightly in artificial benchmarks and a whole lot in day to day use. If the drive is feeling slow then defragment it first.