Performance in Intel IOMeter: Sequential Read & Write

The low-level IOMeter test helps explore the speed characteristics of a hard disk drive at linear reading and writing. The test utility is sending a stream of read/write requests with a request queue depth of 4. The size of the data block requested is changed each minute. We will see the dependence of the linear read/write speed of the drives on the size of the data block.

The linear speed diagram shows that both the drives from Seagate have similar results despite different interfaces. The 60GB drive from the K7100 family is far better in read speed than the 60GB drive from the K760 family beginning from a data chunk size of 16KB. The Hitachi 7K100 60GB (HTS721060G9AT00) is considerably slower than the two Seagate drives. The Hitachi 7K100 100GB (HTS721010G9SA00) boasts the highest read speed of all beginning from 32KB data blocks.

The second diagram shows the linear write speed of the drives. You can see that there are no great changes since the previous diagram. The results of the Seagate drives are still very close. The 7K100 family drive again looks the better of the two 60GB models from Hitachi as it has a higher write speed on large data blocks. The SATA-interfaced 7K100 100GB (HTS721010G9SA00) model is again the fastest, confirming its superiority over the opponents at processing large data blocks.