X-bit labs

Roundup: Six 2.5-Inch Hard Disk Drives with 160GB Storage Capacity (page 7)

Category: Storage

by Aleksey Meyev

[ 12/05/2007 | 03:04 PM ]

Multi-Thread Read & Write

The multi-threaded tests simulate a situation when there are one to four clients accessing the hard disk at the same time. The depth of the outgoing request queue is varied from 1 to 8. I’ll discuss diagrams for a request queue of 1 because the speeds do not depend much on the number of clients at request queue depths of 2 and more.

You can see the operation (or non-operation) of firmware here. The HDDs go neck and neck at one read thread, with the Fujitsu in the lead and the Hitachi in the rear. Seagate HDDs don’t like to process multiple threads, and the ST9160821AS slows down even when there are two threads to be processed. The Hitachi loses its speed as well, differing from the Seagate at two threads only.

The Fujitsu wins this test. The Samsung has a good result, too.

The HDDs don’t differ much in the multi-threaded writing test, forming three groups. The first group includes the Fujitsu and Western Digital that are the fastest at processing one thread but worse than the Samsung and Seagate at processing multiple threads. The Hitachi and Toshiba are obviously losers in every case.