X-bit labs

Hitachi Deskstar 7K400 HDD: Godzilla Resurrection (page 4)

Category: Storage

by Sergey Romanov

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

Testbed and Methods

Hard disk drives with the ATA interface were benchmarked on the Promise Ultra133 TX2 controller (BIOS 2.20.0.14 and driver 2.0.0.29).

Drives with the Serial ATA interface were tested on the Promise SATA150 TX2 controller (BIOS 1.00.033, driver 1.0.0.27).

We also publish the results of a single drive attached to the Serial ATA controller integrated into the i865PE+ICH5R chipset.

Testbed configuration:

• Albatron PX865PE Pro II mainboard
• Intel Pentium 4 2.40B CPU (533MHz FSB)
• 256MB PC2700 DDR SDRAM, CL2
• IBM DTLA 307015 system disk
• ATI RADEON VE graphics card
• Windows 2000 Professional with Service Pack 4

Benchmarking software:

• WinBench 99 2.0
• IOMeter 2003.02.15
• FC-Test v.0.5.3

For WinBench tests we created a single partition and formatted it in FAT32 or NTFS with the default size of the cluster (we use Paragon Partition Manager for FAT32 partitioning). We run each test seven times and publish the best number. The drives do not cool down between the tests. For FC-Test we created two 32GB partitions on the disk.

We use Sequential Read, Sequential Write, Database, Workstation, File Server and Web Server patterns for IOMeter tests. The File and Web Server patterns are the same as they use at StorageReview, while the Workstation pattern is of our own making, based on the statistics of access to an NTFS5 partition taken from the SR methodology. This pattern differs from the server ones in having a smaller load range and a bigger percentage of write operations (a serious workstation is supposed to have a large memory that helps to cache read operations effectively).

You can check our article called Sil 3114 SATALink 4-Port PCI Host SATA RAID Controller from Silicon Image for a thorough description of the patterns.