X-bit labs

Hitachi Deskstar 7K400 HDD: Godzilla Resurrection (page 11)

Category: Storage

by Sergey Romanov

[ 05/23/2005 | 10:11 AM ]

Performance in Intel IOMeter Emulating Patterns

Now, I’m going to try the drives in patterns that emulate a complex load on workstations and servers.

Workstation, File Server, Web Server results (click here to view the results table)

Our Workstation pattern emulates a workstation under a heavy load of several applications running in parallel. Since the percentage of write operations is high here, the 7K400 on the Promise Ultra133 TX2 controller is expectedly slow. The other variants are equally fast, while the HDS722525VLAT80 wins through its advantage in the average seek time on “shortened” platters.

It’s all roughly the same in the File Server pattern despite the larger range of loads. Thanks to a smaller percentage of writes, it is the 160GB model that’s on the losing side now. So, we can talk about some progress of the Deskstar 7K400 over the 7K250.

There are no write operations at all on a web-server without active content (like conferences or other), so all the 7K400 come to the finish the same moment, but lose to both 7K250 due to a bigger average seek time. Well, it’s just more difficult to wield an actuator with ten read/write heads than one with four or six heads. But the difference is rather negligible, anyway.