X-bit labs

Mega Roundup: 20 Hard Disk Drives with 80GB Storage Capacity (page 14)

Category: Storage

by Alexey Volkov , Nikita Nikolaichev

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

Let’s now see the drives reading the file sets.

Well, that’s the first surprise! Maxtor 6Y080P0 is on top, followed by two Hitachi HDDs from the Deskstar 7K250 series. Raptor arrives only the fourth.

This test is full of surprises. Raptor HDD is again in the first line of the diagram! In its wake, we see the WD800LB (this situation looks strangely familiar to the Disk Transfer Rate).

Apart from the comparison of the drives, you may notice one oddity: the read speed is higher than the linear read speed as measured by WinBench. Well, the numbers are true, we don’t deny…

We like to criticize third-party benchmarks and flayed HDTach, PCMark 2002 and PCMark04 mercilessly, but we also openly talk about our own mistakes.

Well, FC-Test is all right. It accurately measures the time it takes the drive to perform an operation, but the operation system is not always cooperative as to the accuracy of our measurements because all disk operations are performed using the Win API. The inaccuracy arises, if you run FC-Test the way we did.

As usual, it is all about laziness. If we had paid our attention to the higher read speed, we would have corrected ourselves sooner.

So, when running FC-Test, we did the following:

1. formatted two logical volumes, 32GB each;
2. created a file set on the first volume;
3. read a file set from the first volume;
4. copied the file set into a folder on the first volume;
5. copied the file set onto the second volume.

Windows 2000 is not the dumbest OS on Earth, and it probably used its cache (in the system RAM) to produce files requested in Item 3, rather than read them from the drive. Of course, we tried to avoid this by installing only 256MB of memory into our testbed, but couldn’t eliminate the “negative” effect of the OS caching altogether.

There is a solution, however! And we knew about it and even implemented the so-called file-lists in FC-Test. The purpose of a file-list is to restore the test status (to restore the currently opened pattern and locations of the files created on the disk) after a system reboot. By rebooting the system you also flush the Windows file cache as well as the contents of the swap file – the test of file reading is started as if with a blank sheet.

So we are now using the forgotten and newly-revived method of “testing with reboot” and are quite happy with the results as well as with their repeatability. It also turned out that “rebooting” doesn’t practically affect the results of file copying.

Now we return to the results, which are not accurate (caching provided somewhat higher numbers, but it helped each drive equally anyway), but nevertheless interesting. The next pattern consists of average-sized files.

WD740GD is the fastest at reading MP3 files (average size = 4MB or thereabouts), although its advantage over the two Hitachi drives is negligible, comparable to the measurement error. Maxtor 6Y080P0 is also close to the leader.

Maxtor 6Y080P0 is the best of all at reading a set of small files. Seagate ST380013AS did surprisingly well, while the former leader, WD740GD, couldn’t even get into the top three.