Performance in Intel Iometer Database Pattern

The Database pattern helps us check how well a hard disk drive handles a stream of write and read operations:

Click to enlarge

The diagram contains the best and worse results under the linear load; all the other models drew graphs that have a similar shape and are very densely located.

That’s Samsung’s way of dealing with writes in combination with reads. The firmware has no problems with writes, increasing the performance proportionally to the writes percentage. I selected all samples with “23” in the firmware version here; as you see, the same number doesn’t promise the same behavior. I don’t know exactly what this number means, but I have some thoughts about the value of the letters. The first letter changed with the modification of the controller chip, and the second is clearly linked with the HDD capacity:

So, Samsung only distinguishes between major differences by the firmware version (the first letter), and even that is not always true. The second letter denotes the HDD capacity, and the digits stand for some mysterious parameter, which affects nothing.

It’s hard to come up with a method for comparing the overall performance of the drives, so I took it easy and averaged the results for each load. Here’s what I got:

We see that the difference in performance within the series can be as big as 13%, and that’s quite much. What’s funny, you cannot tell beforehand what drive you get – faster or slower than the average level!