Intel IOMeter: WorkStation Pattern

Well, the argument in favor of the above mentioned supposition is right here, in the WorkStation pattern results. This typical distinguishing feature of this pattern id a big share of write requests, which has affected the situation among the racers a lot.

The rating for the WorkStation pattern can be calculated with the following formula:

Performance = Total I/O (queue=1)/1 + Total I/O (queue=2)/2 + Total I/O (queue=4)/4 + Total I/O (queue=8)/8 + Total I/O (queue=16)/16 + Total I/O (queue=32)/32

Note that Intel’s controller, which was ahead of all in WebServer pattern and showed the third best result in FileServer pattern occupied the very last position in WorkStation pattern. To tell the truth, I was slightly puzzled with this result: Intel’s controller for desktop PCs works excellently well in server applications, but is shamefully behind in a pattern emulating the work of a desktop disk subsystem :)

At the same time, the two most successful controllers, which have already shown the bets results in all previous tests, namely 3ware 8500-4 and SiliconImage proved impeccable here, too.

Performance in WinBench99 2.0

As usual, we use the WinBench test to see how efficient the hard disk drives and HDD arrays are for desktop needs (this is not the only test we use, anyway).

Just in case, I would like to remind you that we used two Seagate ST3120023AS HDDs with the total storage capacity of 240GB to create a single logical drive of this size. Then we formatted it for NTFS with the help of the operation system utilities with the 4KB default cluster, and for FAT32 formatting we used Paragon Partition Manager Utility.

Let’s start with NTFS:

You have just seen all the results. For easier analysis we would like to pay special attention to two integral tests: Business Disk WinMark and High-End Disk WinMark.

As you see, HighPoint (2.33s) and Promise (WB) controllers boast a pretty big advantage over the other testing participants in High-End Disk WinMark, and in Business Disk WinMark the leading position is occupied by HighPoint controller with different driver versions.

At the same time, the solution from 3ware, which has proven very successful in all low-level tests, is surprisingly slow...