X-bit labs

Western Digital My Book Pro Edition 500GB External HDD Review (page 5)

Category: Storage

by Andrey Kuznetcov

[ 01/06/2007 | 11:24 AM ]

Database Pattern

In the Database pattern the drive is processing a stream of requests to read and write 8KB random-address data blocks. The ratio of read to write requests is changing throughout the test. The request queue depth is varied from 1 to 256 requests.

I limited myself to building only three diagrams out of these numbers:

When the queue has the shortest possible length, the Western Digital drive is faster in almost every case except for write-only mode. The efficiency of the WDG1T5000N doesn’t depend on the interface it uses (FireWire 400 even looks preferable to FireWire 800 here).

Increasing the request queue depth to 16 requests doesn’t bring any changes in the standings of the drives. The Western Digital is faster than its opponents, save in write-only mode when it is again slower than the Maxtor OneTouch III. There’s no difference between the interfaces: the use of FireWire 800 doesn’t bring any profit to the tested drive.

The third diagram shows the results of the drives at the maximum queue length. Like in the previous two cases, the Western Digital delivers higher performance than the other two devices, again with the exception of write-only mode where it is somewhat slower than the Maxtor OneTouch III. And again we see no difference between the three interfaces.