AlienWare X51 System Review (Core i7)

Alienware are using a 1TB Seagate Barracuda mechanical hard drive which is a 7,200 rpm drive with 32MB of cache.

Performance is much as we would expect, scoring around 115 MB/s on the sequential read test and 108 MB/s on the sequential write test. We have seen higher scores from 7,200 rpm mechanical drives, up to 130 MB/s.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark delivers close to the same results. Peaking around 120 MB/s in the read test and 115 MB/s in the write test.

In the real world we found the hard drive to be rather sluggish, although part of the problem is that I have been testing Solid State Drives recently and it is hard to adapt back to a mechanical drive. It would be possible to swap out the drive, although 1TB of storage will prove invaluable to many people.

Personally I would mirror the partition with Acronis software, swap it out for a 120GB SSD and then purchase an external USB 3.0 enclosure for the 1TB drive. Using it for storage.

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