A very important part of overall system responsiveness is down to hard drive performance so we used two of our favourite benchmark utilities Crystalmark X64 Edition and HD Tach to rate the 2.5 inch 7,200 rpm SATA drive.
Hard drive performance is fairly good for a mechanical unit. Under real world conditions however the speed differences between this drive and a quality SSD are clearly felt. We would need to replace this unit with a SSD drive for 24/7 use.