Comparing: Seagate Momentus ST950032-5AS vs AMD Radeon HD 7310 IGPU VRAM Disk

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About Hardware Seagate Momentus ST950032-5AS

The Seagate ST9500325AS is a 500GB hard disk drive (HDD) with a 2.5-inch form factor, designed specifically for laptops, notebooks and portable devices. Utilizing a SATA II interface (3.0 Gbps) and a rotation speed of 5400 RPM, this hard drive offers a combination of low power consumption and sufficient performance for everyday computing needs, such as document storage, media, and light operating system installations.

Equipped with 8MB of buffer cache, the Seagate ST9500325AS is capable of handling basic read/write activities steadily, though not as fast as modern solid-state drives (SSDs). Nevertheless, it remains a popular choice for budget-conscious systems, secondary data storage, or upgrading storage capacity without high costs. Compared to 7200 RPM HDDs, 5400 RPM models like these also generate less heat and noise, making them suitable for laptops that prioritize comfort and power efficiency.

Technically, this HDD has an average seek time of about 12ms and is designed to support daily workloads with a high level of reliability. In our data transfer speed benchmark tests, the Seagate ST9500325AS performed as follows:

• Read Speed (Sequential Read): ~58 MB/s
• Write Speed (Sequential Write): ~62 MB/s

While its performance is far below that of SSDs, it is still relevant for basic use, especially on older systems or when large capacity is more important than speed. The Seagate ST9500325AS is also commonly found as built-in storage on previous generation laptops, and is still widely used for backups, large media file storage, and as a portable storage solution with external enclosures.

Device Test:

Device: Lenovo Sabine B475
CPU: AMD A6-3400M
GPU: IGP Radeon HD 6520G
RAM: 2GB DDR3

Thursday, 24 November 2022 09:14:30 | Update: 1 month ago

About Hardware AMD Radeon HD 7310 IGPU VRAM Disk

The AMD Radeon HD 7310 is an integrated GPU (iGPU) based on the Terascale 2 architecture embedded in some early generation E1 series APUs, such as the AMD E1-1200. With 80 Stream Processors, this GPU is designed for light tasks such as video playback, basic computing, and casual gaming with low graphics settings. Despite being an entry-level GPU and being quite old, the Radeon HD 7310 is still able to operate well for basic needs and certain technical experiments.

In this test using an HP 1000 1b05au device paired with an AMD E1-1200 processor, 4GB DDR3 RAM, and Windows 7 operating system, an interesting experiment was conducted by converting part of the VRAM allocation into a VRAMDisk using specialized GPU RAM Drive software.

VRAMDisk is a method that utilizes VRAM capacity as high-speed temporary storage, just like RAMDisk but with graphics memory. In this configuration, of the total VRAM of 384MB (plus shared memory), about 128MB was set aside to be used as a VRAMDisk. Despite the small capacity, the read and write speeds were quite surprising:

• CrystalDiskMark:
  • Read: 393.23 MB/s
  • Write: 393.66 MB/s

This figure shows that even using an older generation GPU with DDR3 memory and a 128-bit interface, the VRAM still has enough bandwidth for light cache tasks or fast storage experiments. This technology is not intended for daily use, but it can be an interesting alternative for technical purposes, testing, or short-term local access speeds of small files.

Given its limitations-both in terms of VRAM capacity, iGPU performance, and modern driver support-the AMD Radeon HD 7310 is definitely not an option for gaming or heavy workloads right now. However, experiments like this VRAMDisk show that legacy devices can still be creatively utilized in certain contexts, especially in resource-constrained environments.

Device test (testbed) :

Device: HP 1000 1b05au
Software: GPU Ram Drive
CPU: AMD E1-1200
GPU: AMD Radeon HD 7310 (Integrated)
RAM: 4GB DDR3 Single Channel 2 DIMM 1066MHz
OS: Windows 7

Wednesday, 26 December 2012 14:27:32 | Update: 1 month ago