Well, now let’s pass from synthetics to more or less “real” benchmarks. We will start with database pattern under different workloads.

Why did we select load=4 and load=64? The general picture doesn’t actually depend on the workload (number of requests). I will offer you only two examples here, and if you need more info, you are always welcome to compare these results with the 80GB pervious generation drives tested in the article called Real Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 HDD with 80GB Platters Reviewed!

It is interesting that the whole situation changed upside down in this test. 6Y120P0-80 HDD, which has been the leader in most tests, got defeated even by 6Y120L0-60. It is pretty strange, but undeniable. Moreover, the increase in the workload doesn’t tell on the overall picture at all.

All in all, hard disk drives with 2MB cache-buffer run neck and neck. The leader in this test is 6Y120P0-60 with 8MB cache buffer. However, the performance drop suffered by the leader seems quite worrying. We should give credit to the firmware of 6Y120P0-80 for the read requests processing, however, as it comes to write requests, the problems occur. Even though the overall performance difference between the testing participants is not that big.

The situation with the graphs changes a little bit only when we get to queue depth of 256 requests, i.e. to the maximum possible number of requests in a queue. Here the leader of the DataBase pattern, 6Y120P0-60, slows down during reading, but wins back the leadership as the writes share increases. As the share of writes reaches 30%, the situation starts looking pretty familiar. Well, we could forgive the 6Y120P0-60 this dislike of the data reading under the maximum workload, since this situation is not very common for real applications. However, during intensive access of the DataBase server this performance slowdown will be quite noticeable.

Here I would like to draw your attention to a slight lag of the 6Y120P0-60 during pure reading. This data can be very useful later for further analysis.