Defragmentation

Next goes our homemade test of defragmentation speed. We created a very defragmented file system on a 32GB partition of a hard disk by loading it with music, video, games and applications. Then we saved a per-sector copy of the disk and now copy it to the HDD we want to test. The tested HDD is connected to the mainboard’s SATA controller whose operation mode (AHCI/Standard IDE) is controlled from the mainboard’s BIOS. Next we run a script that evokes the console version of the Perfect Disk 8.0 defragmenter and marks the time of the beginning and end of the defragmentation process. Thus, each drive is tested twice – with AHCI support turned on and off on the controller. You can refer to this article for details about this test.

This test is yet another nail into the… Well, it’s just yet another loss for the Seagate drives. Defragmentation takes much more time of them than on any other drive, and SV35.3 spending twice the time of any 7200rpm drive to do the job.

This test is won by the two fast drives from Western Digital and the Hitachi E7K1000. Samsung’s models are somewhat slower than the leaders. Note that the 32MB cache gives no edge to the Green drive whereas the higher density of the 3-platter models helps them outperform the 4-platter versions by over 2 minutes.