X-bit labs

Mega Roundup 2: Twenty Two Hard Disk Drives with 120GB Storage Capacity (page 16)

Category: Storage

by Alexey Volkov , Nikita Nikolaichev

[ 05/09/2004 | 10:05 AM ]

Now we will be copying files into another logical volume.

The Samsung SP1213C is good at copying near or far. Curiously, the Samsung SP1203N and the SV1203N show similar results. It is an indication of good caching algorithms that allow models with a low rotational speed provide good performance.

The leaders remained the same in the ISO pattern, but three drives from Western Digital have got closer to them. Note that the WD1200JB/80* loses considerably to the same model on 60GB platters. It seems like firmware means more here than the difference in the areal density.

The Hitachi IC35L120AVV207-1 speeds up on small files, while other drives remain on their respective places.

The results of copying small files to another partition practically repeat the results of copying within one partition. The drives from Hitachi are good here again, surpassing the competitors. The Maxtor drives are poor at handling small files.

The results for the NTFS file system don’t differ greatly from what we saw in FAT32. So there’s no need for a close examination of the results, just a few remarks: firstly, the speeds of the drives are slightly higher in FAT32 than in NTFS. Secondly, the Maxtor drives are somewhat better in NTFS than in FAT32 and seldom lose to the Hitachi drives in tests with small files.