Performance in Intel IOMeter

Here it is: our most sensitive tool for revealing various HDD firmware peculiarities. However, this software can also be very helpful for the evaluation of other vitally important parameters of our hard drives.

The first test we are going to start with today deals with reading and writing of data blocks of various sizes. I wonder if the results in this pattern will have anything in common with what we have just seen in HDTach?

Here are the performance results for reading during Input-Output operations. This is a pretty illustrative indicator of the HDD performance under different type of workload.

And here the read speed is given in more common megabytes per second:

The models featuring large cache-buffer are indisputable leaders during small data blocks reading. However, as the data blocks grow bigger in size, the models with higher data density per platter get ahead of the others. I would like to draw your attention to the youngest 6Y120L0-60 model. As we have expected, it is a steady outsider here. Well, this is just another proof that HDTach is not completely dead. Not yet.

Now let’s pass over to the writing tests:

The advantage of the drives with large cache-buffer is really impressive, isn’t it? Well, as we see “professional” hard disk drives do not have any problems with sequential writing. However, we still have to check what happens in real applications. So far let’s have a look at the absolute write speed:

No sensation happened. The HDDs behave just the way they should. In case of small data blocks the leadership belongs to drives with large cache-buffer, while in case of large data blocks – to drives with higher platter density.