I recently made up a new computer and decided to go for a WD Black SATA 3 7200RPM 1TB 64MB cache, I used to use the Samsung F3 (SATA 2, 7200RPM 1TB 32MB cache) I have been a bit disapointed with the results

My new hard drive is :

Maximum : 132mb

Average 104mb

Access time : 12.3

Burst : 208mb

My old samsung is :

Maximum : 143mb

Average : 115mb

Access time : 13.8

Burst : 158mb

Which one would you consider better? The WD is about £25 more than the samsung too, so considering sending it back and getting another samsung.

I'm also looking towards getting a SSD, particulary the Agility 3 60GB, since I have a z68 motherboard that can speed up hard drives too? I've never used a SSD before, its quite a lot of money, are they worth it?

Or should I forget a SSD and get 2 samsungs for raid 0?

Benchmark results like those often doesn't reflect reality depending on your hard drive usage of course.

Aside this fact, the lower access time is always better.

Also any sata 3 drive should perform better when copying big files.

Ssd might be useful to host data that need a very low access time like the system but i didn't see a big difference for an xp x86 between and a WD velociraptor (first gen sdd where totally beaten by the velociraptor). As i didn't tried the third ssd generation yet, i can't tell if it's really worth its price for the OS (the second ssd generation was only a little better).

But to host virtual machines, ssd are really great and if the host system is really well optimized you can get great hard drive speed and feeling when using the VM.

If you really want to see a big difference for the OS, you'll have to either buy a real raid controller (any raid controller with R/W cache) or buy pci-express ssd (like a OCZ revo drive).

If you are concerned about system performance then you should listen to what allen2 is saying. RAID-0 won't give you any benefit here as it won't have any impact on the access time.

7200 rpm SATA HDDs have around 13-15ms access time.

I personally use 15000 rpm SAS drives which have 6ms access time and the difference between Samsung F3 and this one is HUGE.

SSD's access time is around 0.1ms - files are accessed almost instantly.