Workstation

Perhaps the WD1500AHFD can do well as a hard drive for a workstation? Why not? The disk subsystem of a workstation is characterized by small loads and a somewhat bigger share of writes. That’s why the new Raptor can show its best here.

At first I ran the test on the whole storage capacity of the drive (assuming that the useful data are spread through the whole disk).

The WD1500AHFD is really in the lead under small loads, but much slower than its opponents under big loads.

Next I will limit the operating zone of the test to 32 gigabytes and run it once again (this simulates the operation of a drive with a 32GB system partition; we can thus compare drives of different capacities and estimate the value of higher areal density).

The results of the WD1500AHFD are considerably better in this test. I wonder how this is going to affect its overall performance rating which we calculate by the following formula:

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 can see from the formula, smaller loads have greater weights in the overall result because they are more typical of a workstation.

And here’re the ratings we’ve got:

Thanks to its higher speed under low loads, the WD1500AHFD has got higher ratings irrespective of how much of the drive’s storage space is in use.