Is "bay 1" the fastest or something?

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I know this doesn't make sense.. all the SATA drives should be about the same speed, assuming their specs are the same. But I swear, if I boot my main drive (Western Digital, came w/ the Mac Pro), it boots super fast. If I boot my clone of that drive (Seagate, cloned by SuperDuper), it takes a bit longer to boot and load everything up. Yet both drives are 8MB cache, same RPM, and actually the Seagate has slightly faster seek/latency times.

Why is the main drive so much faster at booting up?
 

bobtomay

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All drives are not created equal. It could be the system bus, but probably not. When comparing drives of the same size and cache, the WD will beat the Seagate speed wise at almost every test thrown at them. There are some the Seagate will win.

Each brand typically excels at particular aspects. For the hardware enthusiast, researching drives is a major part of building a new system, since you're looking for a drive that is the fastest at your individual primary use.

If you're interested in looking at drive tests, just do a search of your 2 drives. Something like.... WD4000YR 7200.10 reviews ....just the model # of the 2 drives and the word reviews or try WD... vs 7200...

Some good sites for this are Arstechnica, Anandtech, extremetech, techspot, storagereview and others.

Some manufacturers make multiple drives of the same size - particularly WD. They may have 4 different drives, all 500GB, all 16MB cache. So what would be the difference between them? Why choose one over the other? These are a few of the places to check 'em out.

edit: And to rule out the system bus, you could always experiment by physically switching the position of the 2 drives.
 
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Weird. I guess speed is not Seagate's selling point. I buy them because of the awesome 5-year warranty. Man, if I had known Western Digitals were this much faster than Seagates, I would've made slightly different purchasing decisions when I bought the two Seagates I ordered recently.
 
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I love WD. They have always been quiet, cool, and reliable for me.
 

bobtomay

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Weird. I guess speed is not Seagate's selling point. I buy them because of the awesome 5-year warranty. Man, if I had known Western Digitals were this much faster than Seagates, I would've made slightly different purchasing decisions when I bought the two Seagates I ordered recently.

Wouldn't worry about it now Capt. Seagates are decent drives. You've noticed the boot time difference. But, for most things you will not be able to tell between the two of them unless you sit around timing them everytime you do something. And frankly, the difference isn't worth that much effort once you have 'em in your machine. Just purchased the 750GB Seagate myself after it went on sale the same day I was returning a 500GB WD model I ordered showed up DOA (it had been dropped in transit as the box was crushed on one corner). They're not so slow that I would recommend returning them once you have them ordered. And the 5 year warranty on their consumer drives are nice, although WD has the same on their enterprise class drives.

Once you fill up those 4 drives and are looking for some external storage or a drive to use for an HTPC, those Seagates will work admirably. And then do a little research for the current speed king.
 
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Why is the main drive so much faster at booting up?

Different seek times, different controller chips, different firmware, different cache algorithms etc....etc...etc....
 

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