But why are we considering professional applications in the FAT32? It’s high time we passed over to NTFS!

In NTFS, the situation has hardly changed. Only the results obtained with ATA/133 controller grew better than that with ATA/100 controller, and Seagate Barracuda ATA V managed to catch up with the slowest Maxtor drive. Let’s go into details now:

Well, the HDDs behave a little bit differently here. For example, in AVS it was really hard for the IBM drive to retain the leadership, and in Microstation test the laurels went to Seagate, which performed impressively fast in the first three benchmarks, but failed to keep this pace in the next four ones. And it is also very interesting that in many cases ATA/133 has no advantage over ATA/100.

Let us try to figure out what has changed for the last few months when Maxtor was “finalizing” its 80GB platter. Firstly, the linear read speed grew up a lot, which allowed catching up with IBM in terms of video processing speed. Secondly, the lazy write algorithms have been significantly improved.

The great job Maxtor did to eliminate the bottlenecks of its algorithms is seen with a naked eye and leads to evident results: the new HDD is almost an absolute leader. Congratulations!

Intel IOMeter

Well, now we will use another powerful tool to test our hard disk drives: Intel IOMeter. This package can bury the reviewer under a ton of data and if used properly it can serve as an irreplaceable info source about the peculiarities of different hard disk drives. But if used improperly... anyway, let’s not talk about sad things now :)

First of all, we will check how well the hard drives cope with reading and writing data blocks of various sizes.

The poorest result in reading belongs to Barracuda ATA V, and the best result in reading small data blocks – to IBM HDD. As the data block size increases, the new 6Y080L0 leaves its predecessors as well as the IBM drive farther behind. In case of 4KB and 8KB data blocks the UDMA133 mode appears a little better than UDMA100 mode.

And here is the first surprise: Barracuda ATA V managed the small data blocks writing best of all. IBM drive managed to catch up with the leader only when we came to 16KB blocks. And Maxtor drive even outpaced it. What a fast fish this Barracuda, when it wants to be it :) As for the influence of different firmware versions, all Maxtor drives performed nearly identically.