K6-2 and K6-3 Upgrade Guide

Hard Drive Upgrade - Content Creation Performance

Another potential bottleneck of our K6-2/3 series system is the hard drive. With access times slower than newer UDMA-66 7200 RPM drives, our old Western Digital Caviar drive may be giving us some problems. Let's take a look and see what changing to a new Western Digital 153BA ATA-66 7200 RPM hard drive can do to our performance. Since performance gain of the hard drive upgrade should be independent of processor speed, all benchmarks for the hard drive upgrade were performed on our base system with the K6-3 450 MHz processor in the drivers seat.

Hard Drive - SYSMark 2000

Upgrading to a faster hard drive did not result in any performance increase in the SYSMark 2000 test. Keep in mind that since SYSMark does not perform multitasking like Content Creation Winstone 2000 does, these results may be a bit conservative. Let's find out.

As we suspected, the disk swapping and reading that is necessary to multitask effectively results in the 7200 RPM drive performing faster. With the faster hard drive in place, the benchmark performs 19% faster. The hard drive appears to be a bottleneck that not many would expect to find.