MacBook Pro Disk Performance

Beepcake

Beepcake

Beepcake

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My MacBook Pro has been feeling a bit sluggish lately so I have done some XBench comparisons between it and my iMac. My MBP has a slightly faster C2D than the iMac so it just edges it in most tests, but on disk performance it gets completely panned.

Running just the disk test on the 2 machines gives me:

iMac 67.85
MBP 37.41

When comparing a full test to other machines the MBP does well in most things and is then dragged back down to almost G5 levels of performance by the crappy disk performance.

My MBP is a 2.33Ghz C2D (15") with 2 Gig of RAM with the 120gig FUJITSU MHW2120BH drive (15gig free on the OSX partition).. does anyone else have a similar spec machine they can disk benchmark for me?

I'm not sure whether to blow the OS X partition away and reinstall in an attempt to defrag, or look to get a faster disk to put in it. Switching between the 2 machines drives me bonkers because the MBP feels so slow whenever the disk is in use.
 
Yes, I'm well aware of the differences, but the difference is much larger than I'd expect. I'm not entirely sure if the iMac uses a full sized drive or not.
 
Justin said:
37.41, is a bit slow. If you look in the XBench results thread, people that have the same spec as you are getting around 100.

Are you running Leopard?
Click to expand...

That's just the disk score.. not the overall score. I didn't realise there was an XBench results thread :) WotDa has a similar spec to me and only got 31.04 on the disk section :o

Yes, I'm running Leopard.

I'm just getting a bit fedup of the MBP, especially when I'm working in VMWare and OSX together (more disk activity) so I'm wondering whether re-installing will give me a boost, whether a new disk is the order of the day or whether to ditch it completely.
 
FWIW. Just benchmarked my MBP (Disk Only) with a 250GB 5400rpm Western Digital Drive Fitted. Mine's a 2.13Ghz CoreDuo with 2GB of RAM. OS X has the whole drive to itself. Running Leopard.


Results 43.45
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.2 (9C7010)
Physical RAM 2048 MB
Model MacBookPro1,1
Drive Type WDC WD2500BEVS-11UST0
Disk Test 43.45
Sequential 55.25
Uncached Write 54.42 33.41 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 57.47 32.52 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 45.57 13.34 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 68.10 34.22 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 35.80
Uncached Write 13.73 1.45 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 80.95 25.91 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 64.83 0.46 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 90.13 16.72 MB/sec [256K blocks]
 
Beepcake said:
Running just the disk test on the 2 machines gives me:

iMac 67.85
MBP 37.41

My MBP is a 2.33Ghz C2D (15") with 2 Gig of RAM with the 120gig FUJITSU MHW2120BH drive (15gig free on the OSX partition)..
Click to expand...

You're lucky I get 29.xx out of my MacBook Pro's HD and that's with the same 120GB Fujitsu 5400rpm SATA 1.5 (I take it that's 150 rather than 300) drive.

Over firewire 800 my 1TB MyBook Studio get 67.xx (it has a single 1TB 7200rpm WD Sata300 drive in it). Oddly enough with eSATA it gets 47.. so you can tell what I use for Xcode scratch project space and for my Volume based rendering files :)

My MBP is a 2.4 C2D Santa Rosa with 4GB. Running Leopard 10.5.2.

There's an Hitachi Travelstar 7,200rpm drive that really kicks butt for a direct 2.5" replacement. Or there's SSD if you can stomach the cost and live with 64GB..
 
Last edited:
Ah, didn't realise you had run a HDD test only.

I would re-install Leopard if I was you, a fresh, customised install should work perfectly.
 
Justin said:
Ah, didn't realise you had run a HDD test only.

I would re-install Leopard if I was you, a fresh, customised install should work perfectly.
Click to expand...

I'm starting to lean towards a new drive looking at everyone else's benchmarks.. mine doesn't seem to fair too badly.

I might nuke it and see how it goes first though.. might re-install my bootcamp partition too so everything is nice and clean.
 
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