Performance in Intel IOMeter: Workstation Pattern

This pattern loads the hard disk drive with a lot of write requests, so the drive’s firmware must do deferred writing well in order to succeed here.

We see that firmware 3.71 of the Seagate ST3160023A model is poor compared to the other versions. Write requests slow this model down dramatically. Let’s take a look at the performance ratings:

The WD 1600JB drive is the best here, yet we might have guessed it by the results of the Database pattern. The Maxtor 6Y160L0 is a mild surprise – the firmware of this drive is making a most efficient use of its small 2MB cache buffer. Strangely enough, the best of the Hitachi team took only the 11-th place – they seem to dislike mixed modes (with both reading and writing). The Seagate ST3160023AS with firmware 3.05 holds the second position.

Now we reduce the address space of the drives to 32GB and repeat the test.

The Seagate ST3160023A with firmware 3.71 loses hopelessly here, even to the other PATA drives from the same company.

It seems like we have been too hasty dismissing the model with firmware 3.18 – it did quite well in the restricted 32GB space. As usual, the Samsung disks are good, especially the SP1614 that took the second place. The “old” Hitachi IC35180AVV207-1 drive is the third (don’t forget it features a three-platter design, which reduces its access time).

This was the last of synthetic IOMeter patterns; we can now proceed to WinBench 99.