Testbed, Testing Participants and Testing Methods

In our today’s test session there will be 5 models from the IBM Deskstar 180GXP HDD family and for a more illustrative comparison we will also add the results for a solution from the previous generation 120GXP family. As usual, we will use simpler and shorter names for the testing participants in our diagrams and tables:

If you studied the table above carefully enough, you should have noticed that the IC35L060AVV207-0 model is mentioned twice. This is not a mistake: the 40GB 180GXP HDD was marked exactly like that (check this photo to see what I am talking about).

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 controller;
• 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.

These patterns are intended to measure the disk subsystem performance under workloads typical of file- and web-servers.

WorkStation pattern for Intel IOMeter was developed basing on the StorageReveiw's study of the disk subsystem workload in ordinary Windows applications. The pattern was based on the average IPEAK statistics StorageReview provided for Office, High-End and Bootup work modes in NTFS5 file system and mentioned in Testbed3 description.

We will use this pattern for evaluating HDDs efficiency during intensive professional work in Windows.