FC-Test: NTFS

Well, let’s shift to a different file system. In NTFS the cluster is smaller, which can affect the performance of the CPU-dependent controllers. Anyway, let’s find it out:

As usual, we will start with writing:

At first sight, there are hardly any changes. Just like in FAT32 the fastest is the SATA drive with Promise SATA 150 TX2 Plus (WB) controller. Moreover, with the smaller files it demonstrated a tangible advantage over the rivals.

Reading is also just the same as we saw in FAT32.

Well, when we copied the file sets within one logical drive, the best results were shown by SATA drives with SiliconImage controller. Promise SATA 150 TX2 Plus controller working in WB mode managed to get ahead only when copying smaller files.

If we compare the copy speeds of SATA and ATA HDDs, we will see that there is only one model, ST3120024A with 8MB cache-buffer that can become a worthy competitor to the newcomers. The regular ATA hard drives with 2MB cache-buffer unfortunately proved 1.5 times slower.

When we copied the files to the second logical drive WB-caching again helps Promise controller to beat SiliconImage in three patterns out of five.