X-bit labs

Hitachi Travelstar 7K60 HDD: 7,200rpm Achieved! (page 16)

Category: Storage

by Andrey Kuznetcov

[ 01/20/2004 | 11:40 PM ]

Performance in FC-Test

As usual, we used five standard patterns in FC-Test. The ISO pattern consists of three files, a few hundred megabytes each. The MP3 pattern includes a few dozens of files of the typical size – 1.5-8MB. Numerous and various files (from several bytes to 25MB) make up the Install pattern. The remaining two patterns – Programs and Windows – are practically the same as the namesake folders on your own hard disk. By the way, the average file size in the Windows pattern is somewhat smaller than that in the Programs pattern. We used two file systems: FAT32 and NTFS. At first, we formatted all 80GB drives into two logical partitions, 32GB each. The drives with smaller capacities were partitioned into two equal logical disks.

We deliberately grouped the drives according to their capacity (80, 60 and 40GB) in the diagrams below for better evaluation of their performance. It should be noted that it’s not quite correct to compare results shown by the drives of different “weights” as different usage of the disk space influences the numbers inevitably.

Hitachi 7K60 is the fastest at creating files. Hitachi 5K80 is the second fastest as it only lost to Hitachi DK23FB drives in the ISO pattern. By the way, the pair of DK23FB devices proved very stable across the patterns and shared the third and fourth places. Toshiba MK8025GAS was the best in Windows and Programs patterns (working with a lot of small files); as you remember, it was also good at processing small data blocks. Hitachi 40GN was again the last one.

The new Hitachi drives are superior at reading data. Next goes Seagate Momentus, closely followed by the pair of DK23FB drives from Hitachi. Hitachi 40GN is once again the slowest.

When copying file sets within one single partition, the drives rank up in a similar way: Hitachi 7K60, 5K80 and Seagate Momentus. However, they are now much faster than the rest of the drives, save for the Windows pattern where Hitachi 80GN outperforms the Momentus. Hitachi 40GN doesn’t look so hopeless in this test, at least the DK23FB drives and Toshiba MK8025GAS were even worse.