I pulled a 3.5" year 2013 era WD3200AAKX off the shelf to do a test installation. It was SLOW. The specs call for 7200 rpm 16MB and SATA III. So I test it with a common HDD speed utility. On two different motherboards it maxes out consistently at 100MB/s. Like I said, slow, especially for an OS boot drive. 100MB/s is common for DAS SATA II. DAS SATA III usually sees 130-200 MB/s from my experience.
Anyone know if there is a firmware update for this disk? I tried to find one but have no luck yet.
I appreciate the helpful pic link and informative comment. Just for fun, I ran the same utility on the same disk and attached the pic.
I like it that the yellow dots show us the random access times (in ms) increasing as the heads move from the outside (ie. 0%) to the inside (ie. 100%) of the disk.
Just for some more fun, I ran the utility on a SSD just to see what happens. At first I said, “Where are the yellow dots?” Then I noticed that they were there, but just lined up on the 1ms position at the very bottom of the chart. Ha, fooled me! Here’s the pic: