How do you meaure Drive Cache / RPM speed

[c627627]

This hard drive lists neither
WD15000H1CS-00 aka WDH1CS15000
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=111&lang=en

Someone called Western Digital to ask only to be told that WD randomly install drives with different size cache/RPM speeds. :shrug:

Could be 8, 16 or 32, could be 5400 or 7200. Hm.

[Xaotic]

Sadly, with commodity hardware like this, you can expect whatever they have plenty of. There is a fair chance of having clipped 2TB drives there as well.

If you have one already, device mangler, devmgmt.msc, in windows will identify the model under the Hard Drives hive. Linux is not as friendly. hdparm will not function over USB interfaces.

[c627627]

But can we measure a blank label drive?

Someone once said that it's all about transfer rates and claimed that it comes down if one drive has "higher density" than the other so theoretically there were 5400 RPM models which were actually "faster than" certain 7200 RPM drives because of their "density".


It probably matters where on the drive the data is stored but I think it is a legitimate question, how do you compare two blank label drives to determine which one is better?

Can the RPM sped be actually measured?