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.
Thats really very sexy looking. I like it. Wonder if you can fit a better GPU in it. would the PSU handle it?
Nice photos. I was going to say I wonder why they hadn’t moved to the new 3rd generation processors, but I notice they just did. good move 🙂
Its a nice idea, but the power brick is massive. kinda ruins the point of having such a small case. no?