X-bit labs

Mega Roundup: 20 Hard Disk Drives with 80GB Storage Capacity (page 13)

Category: Storage

by Alexey Volkov , Nikita Nikolaichev

[ 04/15/2004 | 01:43 PM ]

Performance in X-bit’s FileCopy Test

That’s the most exciting part of our roundup. We run FC-Test according to our standard methodology: we created two logical volumes, 32GB each, on the HDDs and formatted them in NTFS and FAT32. We created a set of files on the first logical volume and read it, then copied it into a folder on the same volume (i.e. within one partition) and to another partition. We use five sets of files:

• Install – 414 files with a total size of 575MB;
• ISO – three files with a total size of 1.6GB;
• MP3 – 271 files with a total size of 1GB;
• Programs – 8504 files with a total size of 1.4GB;
• Windows – 9006 files with a total size of 1.06GB.

NTFS starts the tests.

Because we have 20 HDDs participating, we will discuss the results in detail pattern by pattern. So we start by creating a set of files on the drive:

WD740GD is the fastest at creating files from the Install pattern, although it doesn’t have its usual colossal advantage over the rest of the HDDs. Three Maxtors are closely following the Raptor! Let me remind you once again that the drive from Western Digital rotates its platters about 40% faster than its closest pursuers do. So the HDDs from Maxtor show simply astonishing results for their class.

Maxtor 6Y080P0 gets very close to WF740GD on large files like ISO ones. The gap is smaller than the measurement error for this test. In other words, we can say that these two drives show the same performance.

Finally, we see what seemed incredible. Maxtor 6Y080P0 is faster than the Raptor drive! I wonder if it is just a coincidence. Let’s see the drives processing smaller files.

Faster heads positioning allows Raptor to regain its leadership and increase the gap. However, the stubborn Maxtors are all following the leader. 6Y080P0 loses its position to the SATA mate, which has better access time.

We have the same group of leaders, only Samsung SP0802N with its scanty 2MB of cache memory suddenly takes the third place! I wonder what SP0812N and SP0812C would show us if they were participating in this test session?!