Reading also brings us no surprises: HDDs with lower physical speed fall behind. It was pretty interesting to see the HDDs with large buffer perform better when reading small files. As we have already pointed out during the discussion of Intel IOMeter tests, they read 4KB data blocks typical of NTFS a little faster. By the way, in FAT32 the leadership belongs to 120GB 180GXP hard drive with 2MB buffer.

When we copy files within a single FAT32 partition, the solutions with 8MB buffer get about 20% faster than the rest of the testing participants. 120GXP HDD yields a little bit to 180GXP and again manages to stay far from the last positions. And in NTFS the competition was very tense. Again we have every proof that physical speed doesn’t matter for real tasks, and a lot depends on firmware algorithms.

When we copy from one partition to another, the models with 8MB buffer boast an advantage of 34%. Of course, it is a little less than 50%+ we saw in case of Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 HDDs, but it is not bad at all, I should say. It solely because IBM algorithms ensure good performance even with a small buffer that is why larger buffer doesn’t make a dramatic sensation.