Now, let’s deal with copying within one and the same partition (copy near).

Again, we see the drives from Samsung and Maxtor coming to blows. The Samsung SP1213C was the absolute winner, though, as it is the only drive to overcome the 20MB/s barrier.

Copying of large files suggests that large cache doesn’t necessarily mean success at copying – the Samsung SP1203N (with 2MB of cache memory) competes with more advanced participants. And really, the size of the copied file exceeds that of the buffer here…

The drives from Hitachi are surprisingly poor in this test – probably the firmware doesn’t allow “enlarging” cache lines to the maximum.

The Samsung SP1213C likes copying MP3-like files – it left other drives far behind. The IC35L120AVV207-1 and HDS752512VLAT20 models from Hitachi make amends after the disaster at copying the ISO pattern. The Samsung SP1203N seems like stuck to two drives from Maxtor, 6Y120P0/80 and 6Y120M0. Notwithstanding its small cache, the Samsung never loses to the Maxtors for a few tests already.

The drives from Samsung are good at copying both small and large files: you can see it by the results of the Programs and Windows patterns. Two drives, the SP1213C and the SP1203N, were the fastest in Programs, while the slow 5400rpm SV1203N outperformed the fast Maxtor 6Y120P0 in the Windows pattern! The Hitachi team seems to wake up on small files, showing decent results.