X-bit labs

Ultra-Small Hard Disk Drives: Does It Make Sense? (page 5)

Category: Storage

by Aleksey Meyev

[ 08/29/2007 | 12:56 PM ]

Performance in Intel IOMeter

Sequential Read & Write Patterns

As always we would like to start with the results of synthetic Intel IOMeter testing suite.

Let’s compare the results obtained during sequential reading and writing of 512Byte-1MB data blocks for each device:

In the left part of the write speed diagrams the testing participants run almost neck and neck and with 4KB data blocks Seagate Pocket Drive even takes the lead leaving the rival 1.4MB/s behind. However, starting with 16KB data blocks and up it lets the Corsair Flash Voyager drive get ahead. The “sphere” freezes at 9.3MB/s level: the hard disk drive inside it cannot do any better than that.

During reading, the hard drive falls even farther behind the flash drive. At soon as the data block size reaches 8KB, Seagate Pocket Hard Drive reaches its maximum speed of the same 9.3MB/s. As for the Corsair Flash Voyager, its read speed keeps increasing up to 30MB/s with the growth of the data block size.

Almost twice as fast during writing and three times as fast during reading! This is an indisputable victory of the USB flash drive.