The ongoing graphs will help us to evaluate the drives scalability. RandomRead pattern comes first:

The reading results rate the HDDs in indirect proportion to their average access time, but as the workload increases, firmware algorithms do not always lead to positive outcome. If Seagate managed to stay close behind the leader, then the Maxtor drives with the old firmware slow down a lot. We were very pleased to see that this issue had been eliminated in the new firmware of Maxtor drives.

This diagram contains averaged data for all reads-to-writes ratios, except two extremes.

Here IBM shows what it is capable of: having started from the very last position this HDD managed to win in the long run. The drive owes its victory to TCQ technology, which implies that it can put aside and combine the requests (including reads) in the way it considers best.

In case the writes share reaches 100% the graphs look absolutely differently. The HDDs with the lazy write function manage the data quite successfully, when the workload is minimal or medium. But starting from 64 simultaneous requests, requests sorting in the OS drivers matters more. Barracuda ATA V proved the best here, while 6Y060L0 appeared the slowest one, as we had actually expected. The interesting thing is that more advanced management of the 6Y080L0 easily made up for the lack of average access time.