X-bit labs

Maxtor OneTouch II External Hard Disk Drive with FireWire 800 Interface (page 3)

Category: Storage

by Andrey Kuznetcov

[ 09/01/2005 | 09:30 AM ]

Performance in Intel IOMeter: Sequential Read & Write Patterns

First we will measure sequential read and write speeds in IOMeter. The drive was processing a stream of read/write requests with a request queue depth of 4; the data block size was changed every minute. As a result, we can see the dependence of the drive’s sequential read/write speed on the size of the processed data block. Then we can compare these data for each interface.

The diagram shows you how the interface type can affect the linear read speed of the drive. The FireWire800 interface is beyond competition: the read speed is steadily increasing up to 16KB data blocks and then reaches its ceiling at about 63MB/s. FireWire400 is the second most efficient interface of the three, ensuring a noticeably higher speed than with USB 2.0.

The write speed diagram depicts another triumph of the FireWire800 interface – no comments are necessary. The drive is much faster with this interface than with the other two between which FireWire400 is better than USB 2.0.