X-bit labs

Mega Roundup 2: Twenty Two Hard Disk Drives with 120GB Storage Capacity (page 9)

Category: Storage

by Alexey Volkov , Nikita Nikolaichev

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

Performance in Intel IOMeter File Server & Web Server Patterns

Let’s compare the drives by their averaged performance (the average of the drive’s speeds at four loads – 1, 4, 16 and 64 requests).

The Hitachi team occupies the top of the table, followed by drives from Western Digital and two Samsung HDDs (SP1213C and SP1203N). Two drives from Seagate are at the bottom of the table, surpassed even by the SV1203N model from Samsung, which has smaller spindle rotation speed!

The Hitachi team goes unrivalled, like in the previous test. Two Samsung drives outperformed the group of WD devices and the rest of the table is practically the same. Well, there is a change that should certainly be emphasized. The Samsung SV1203N is the last here. It means that the “failure” of the two Seagate drives in the File Server pattern is not because of their high access time (we’ll see it later), but rather because of their disdainful attitude towards lazy writing. This is perfectly seen in the graphs of the drives which they drew in the Database pattern.