Performance in Intel IOMeter WorkStation Pattern

WorkStation pattern should imitate the workload created by user working hard in different applications under NTFS5 file system.

The performance of the single hard disk drive drops down as the requests queue depth increases. RAID 0 arrays demonstrate a certain performance improvement, although the array of three drives still cannot be called scaleable on the number of HDDs, like in the previous patterns.

You can notice the RAID 1 and RAID 10 performance depends on the number of HDDs involved only when the queue depth exceeds four requests. At the same time, RAID 5 of four drives starts running faster than RAID 5 of three.

The large share of writes in the WorkStation pattern makes the performance depend more on the lazy write algorithms.

The WorkStation rating is calculated according to 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

Since the writes share is pretty high here, the results appeared quite predictable. RAID 5 arrays fell even behind a single HDD. RAID 1 array gave way to RAID 0 of two HDDs, while RAID 10 array fell behind RAID 0 of four.

Another very interesting rating is to come now. We have already shown you how greatly the performance of Intel SRCS14L controller depends on the lazy write algorithms involved. Now we suggest comparing the three last patterns in this respect:

The performance difference in one and the same pattern depends on the lazy write algorithms of the HDDs used, and the performance difference between various patterns is determined by the writes share, and by the constantly enabled controller lazy writing (if the HDD lazy writing is disabled). Therefore, the performance difference in WebServer pattern with 0% of writes depends on the HDD lazy writing and lies within the measuring error, and shows the slowest performance compared with the other patterns. FileServer with 20% of writes is the second fastest in both: performance and performance difference. And the first prize, of course, belongs to WorkStation boasting the highest writes share of all three.