Performance

HDTach 2.61

The competition will start in the notorious HDTach:

Before we pass over to the major parameters comparison, please, have a look at the CPU Utilization rates. The best result here belongs to Seagate Barracuda ATA V, which is also proven by the other benchmarks. And the new Maxtor’s firmware on the contrary, demonstrates high CPU Utilization, close to that by IBM drive. Very interesting...

What do we see in terms of average access time? Exactly, what I have already warned you about: two HDD groups with the same platter configuration. The new 6Y080L0 is slightly behind the predecessor, which indicates that the data organization on the platter remained the same (the same number of servomarks identifying sectors on the track, see our article called Western Digital WD2500JB HDD: More than Drivezilla?! for details).

By subtracting from the measured time the average rotational latency equal to ca. 4.17ms for all tested HDDs, we will get the average seek time.

• Maxtor 6Y080L0/80 – 9.3ms
• Maxtor 6Y060L0/60 – 9.2ms
• Maxtor 6Y080L0/60 – 8.2ms
• IBM IC35L090AVV2-0 – 8.2ms
• Seagate ST380023A – 8.3ms

As you see, the seek time of the HDDs by three competing corporations appeared very similar. IBM drives used to be the leaders here, and now I really don’t know if I should be upset with IBM or happy with Seagate and Maxtor. :) note, that the use of “shorter” platters (three HDDs from the bottom) ensure about 1ms advantage in average seek time.

Well, we have finally come to those parameters, which usually show all the advantages of the increased data density. The read/write rates always grow up as the data density increases, and this case is no exception. IBM however resorted to such technologies as No-id sector format and didn’t use slower internal tracks, that is why only IBM managed to nearly catch up with the new solution from Maxtor in average speeds.

Here we also see the first indication of a new firmware by 6Y080L0 HDD: the read speed from the buffer grew a little slower. But this is not that important, as this parameter doesn’t directly affect the HDD performance.

Now let’s see how the platters of the today’s testing participants are organized. In the diagram below the measured speeds have been transformed into the millions of Bytes per second:

What can we say here? The new platter helped Maxtor to speed up a lot (it is almost 20% faster), but the IBM solution is almost as fast. Of course, the drives with 60GB platters boast better results in the end of the platter. By the way, the read speed grew up to 60MB/sec, which is beyond the UDMA66 protocol potential.