Intel IOMeter: WorkStation

The server benchmarks revealed a certain advantage of SATA hard disk drives and Promise controllers. But how well will the drives run if they are used for desktop needs? And what is the difference between the disk subsystem workload of a desktop PC and a server? First of all the difference lies with the requests intensiveness. This is why our WorkStation pattern is aimed at checking the HDD performance under smaller workloads (1-32 outcoming requests):

We use a different formula to calculated the HDD performance rating in this pattern. In the server patterns we simply averaged the Total I/O values obtained. And since high workloads are not typical of desktop disk subsystems (to be more exact, they may occur sometimes, but it will not last long), it would be more correct to take them into account as well but to assign a certain weight coefficient to them:

Performance = 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

As you see, this is a very simple formula: the contribution to the final performance rating is inversely proportional to the corresponding queue depth. Note that this formula has been derived empirically and we don’t claim any deep scientific background to be involved :)

 But anyway, it rates the HDDs very quickly. Have a look at the 80GB drives: SATA HDDs are indisputable winners here. The 120GB SATA drive performed a little less impressive, but it also managed to outpace the rivals in its own group.

I wonder what caused this speeding of SATA drives? Is it the interface that helps them out? It is more likely to be larger cache-buffer, as the write requests are quite numerous in WorkStation pattern.