Now that we have learned the main characteristics of the drives, it’s time to take a look at patterns that imitate real-life HDD jobs.

Professional use comes first. Imagine a workstation with an NTFS5-formatted hard disk where several simultaneously running applications create intensive traffic with a high share of write operations.

If the IBM/Hitachi drive didn’t have an advantage in the way of the shortened platter, both Samsung drives would be in the lead – they showed practically identical results.

Let’s calculate HDD performance ratings for this pattern with the following formula:

WorkstationRating = IOps(1) + IOps(2) + IOps(4) + IOps(8)/1.5 + IOps(16)/2

Maxtor and Seagate fell far behind under this type of workload. It would be interesting to see how efficiently they use the CPU resources. IOMeter calculates a special coefficient called CPU Effectiveness. The rating is calculated according to a formula with the same weights.

Once again, the IBM/Hitachi product is the first, the Samsung HDD – the second.