WorkStation Pattern

During the workstation emulation tests, the hard drive workload was limited to only 32 requests queue. The results were taken for the entire hard disk drive storage capacity as well as for the 32GB address space.

In order to give you a better idea of the interfaces efficiency we built the performance rating diagram with the results calculated by the following formula:

Performance Rating = Total I/O (queue=1)/1 + Total I/O (queue=2)/2 + Total I/O (queue=4)/4 + Total I/O (queue=8)/8 + Total I/O (queue=16)/16 + Total I/O (queue=32)/32

The first diagram shows the hard drive’s performance when we use up the entire storage capacity of the drive. The performance difference is not that dramatic in all three cases. The advantage of FireWire 800 interface over FireWire 400 interface is nominal. The use of USB 2.0 interface pushes our hero farther behind.

The second case we took into consideration here is when the storage capacity in question is limited to 32GB. The results remain practically the same, but the overall performance increases, which is quite logical. The performance difference between different interfaces is again quite small, but the maximum results are again obtained with FireWire 800, and the minimum results – with USB 2.0.