Performance hit with new hard drive?

I've recently upgraded my laptop's internal hard drive from a 160GB to 1TB drive. I cloned the drive, then installed it. The general system performance seems appreciably slower. In particular application launches seem to take much longer. Is this possible, or am I just expecting too much from the new drive?

It's running a Macbook Pro which is a couple of years old. Any ideas?

160 GB  7MB cache  5400 rpm    NCQ  (Hitachi HTS545016B9SA02) -- original drive
1   TB  8MB cache  5400 rpm  SATA300  NCQ  (Western Digital WD10TPVT-00HT5T0)

Sisoftware links:

aaaidan

Posted 2011-02-10T06:23:57.260

Reputation: 139

The spindle speed is slower. Also, look at the bottom of this link: http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/feedback/1tb_wd_scorpio_in_macs.html

– None – 2011-02-10T06:44:21.710

@Randolf Potter - thanks for the link, but I can't find any info about spindle speed on that page... Surely my WD can't be slower than 5400rpm? – aaaidan – 2011-02-12T05:48:05.297

Answers

It may simply be a slower drive - not all drives are equal. There are a fair number of things that can affect performance - caching strategy, number of platters, and so on. In addition, all other things being equal, larger drives tend to have a little more overhead. If you want to test your drives to see if there's actually a performance difference, try something like Xbench.

Scott

Posted 2011-02-10T06:23:57.260

Reputation: 5 323

Thanks for the Xbench tip. Although I've not yet tested my old drive, Xbench does show that my new drive is freakishly and consistently slow in some areas. It gets a score of ~14 for 4k random writes, and ~55 for sequential and random 4k reads. The latter, I think, pertains to application launches, so cheers for helping me figure that one out. – aaaidan – 2011-02-13T01:27:34.363