Testbed and Methods

Our test system was configured as follows:

• ASUS P3B-F mainboard
• Intel Pentium III (Coppermine) 600MHz CPU;
• 2 x 128MB PC100 ECC SDRAM by Hyundai;
• IBM/Hitachi DPTA 372050 host HDD;
• Matrox Millennium 4MB graphics card;
• Promise Ultra100 TX2 and Promise Ultra133 TX2 controllers;
• Windows 2000 Professional SP2.

We used the following benchmarking software:

• HDTach 2.61;
• WinBench 99 2.0;
• Intel IOMeter 1999.10.20;
• FC-Test v.0.5.3.

All drives that support “quiet seek/normal seek” operation modes were switched to the fast mode by means of Hitachi Feature Tool. For WinBench tests, the drives were formatted in FAT32 and NTFS as a single partition with a default cluster size. We used Paragon Partition Manager for FAT32 formatting. The benchmarks were run seven times each; the maximum result was taken for further analysis. The HDDs didn’t cool down between the tests. The tests in Intel IOMeter were run in SequentialRead, SequentialWrite, DataBase, WorkStation, FileServer and WebServer patterns. If you are looking for the detailed description of these patterns, please, see our previous articles in the Storage section.

Performance in HDTach 2.61

Despite the fact that HDTach has been considered not quite objective lately (and it is not for nothing that some of you may think so), I still hope it would be pretty interesting to take a look at the results in this “veteran” benchmark. Especially since the results it provides could be considered credible within a single platform tested.

What can I say here? The average (as well as the maximum) data read speed is higher on hard disk drives with higher per platter data density, while the HDDs with large cache-buffer (6Y120P0) show the minimal read speed in this test. Of course, we could blame the peculiarities of these given models or on the fact that Maxtor selects better platters for “professional” P0 solutions. However, the fact that the minimum data read speed looks like that can also indicate more efficient read ahead algorithms of P0 models, which is within firmware responsibility already. The read ahead is very likely to be working better on HDDs with 8MB cache-buffer. And the 2MB models simply have less space for prediction buffer which leads to less efficient read ahead.