Now that we know everything about the HDDs peculiarities, it is even more exciting to check how well they perform in patterns imitating various application fields.

The first here will deal with professional applications. So, imaging a workstation with a hard disk drive formatted in NTFS5, where several programs running at the same time create a pretty intense traffic with a big share of writes in it.

Hm, the difference can only be noticed under a magnifying glass :) One thing is clearly visible though: IBM is far from being the best, Maxtor 6Y080L0 and barracuda ATA V are considerably better. However, the new Maxtor drive managed to significantly improve its performance compared with that of 6Y060L0, that is why if all the drives were working in equal conditions, it could undoubtedly become the winner.

The general rating can be calculated with the following formula:

WorkstationRating = IOps(1) + IOps(2) + IOps(4) + IOps(8)/1,5 + IOps(16)/2

Exactly what we have already said: the difference between the fastest and the slowest drive is less than 6%. But let me assure you, IBM will still feel much slower than Maxtor 6Y080L0 because of considerably lower results under linear workload.

The second application for our HDDs is the work in a File-Server:

The good old Maxtor 6Y080L0 started just excellently, but then lost its fast pace and let the rivals ahead. We were very pleased to see that the new solution had no electronics issues and managed to elbow its way through almost to the very frontline. Though not to the first position....

The server application rating can be calculated as follows:

FileServerRating = IOps(1) + IOps(2) + IOps(4)/1,5 + IOps(8)/2 + IOps(16)/3

IBM is the indisputable No. 1 in Server applications. Seagate also performed very well, but Maxtor drives turned outsiders there. Where is the great server experience inherited from Quantum?