Performance in Intel IOMeter: Sequential Read & Write Patterns

The hard disk drive is receiving a stream of read/write requests in this test, the request queue always remaining four requests long. Once every minute, the size of the processed data block changes, so we get the correlation between the linear read (or write) speed and the data chunk size.

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The Hitachi IC35L180AVV207-1 is reading small data blocks (up to 4KB) better than the others, but then yields its leadership to the HDS722516VLAT20 model from the same company. The Maxtor 6Y160P0 and the Samsung SP1614C did the reading quickly enough, too.

Irrespective of the firmware version, the Seagate ST3160023AS works badly with small-size blocks, while the WD 1600JD/60 is the slowest on large blocks – take note of this curious fact.

Once again we split the participants up into groups by manufacturer for better readability of the results.

You can view the graphs by the following links:

• Hitachi (graph);
• Maxtor (graph);
• Samsung (graph);
• Seagate (graph);
• Western Digital (graph).

Let’s see how these results change at writing:

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The Maxtor 6Y160P0 is the fastest at writing data blocks of any size but the three disks from Samsung are following it closely.

The Western Digital 1600BB and 1600LB handle small blocks very badly, and the Seagate ST3160023A with firmware 3.71 is disgustingly slow at writing big data blocks. In the diagram below you may see that this disk cannot exceed a barrier of 20MB/s. Other disks from Seagate don’t show this behavior, so we are inclined to think that the firmware is to bear the blame. Curiously, one and the same firmware version 3.71 acted up both at random requests (Database pattern) and at sequential ones…

The diagrams follow:

• Hitachi (graph);
• Maxtor (graph);
• Samsung (graph);
• Seagate (graph);
• Western Digital (graph).

The next patterns simulate the typical load on the disk subsystem of a server.