Performance

HDTach 2.61

The first benchmark to discuss is HDTach. In the previous test session we discovered some issues about it, as you remember (see our Seagate Barracuda Serial ATA V Hard Disk Drive Review for more details). I wonder if it copes with the task this time (although after our investigation last time I offer you these numbers only for the sake of tradition).

So what do we see here? The claimed average access time of the WD360GD drive evidently proved to be absolutely correct. We only see a slight deviation in case of Promise (WB) controller. As we know, in WriteBack mode the Promise controller drivers do process the requests, which definitely requires some time. If these are random requests, the driver fails to benefit from requests caching and the time the CPU spends on requests history processing simply increases the overall access time.

However, if the driver receives multiple read requests for the same data block, like in case of HDTach read burst speed measurements, then the Promise drivers improve the HDD performance quite significantly. :)

Too bad, but HDTach test seems to be unable to work properly with these tricky drivers.

Intel IOMeter: Sequential Read and Write

Now let’s try to measure the read and write speed with our “own” methods:

Of course, WD360GD is faster than its younger brother, WD400JB, when working with the data blocks of any size. But have you expected any other result here?

And if we analyze the performance of WD360GD with different controllers, we will have to point out stably high performance with SiliconImage controller and extremely high read speed with Promise (WB). From our previous article you know why the results look like this.

By the way, when we shift to larger data blocks (over 128KB), the read speed of Raptor + Promise controller combination drops down in all driver modes.

When we compared the read speed of all our testing participants we discovered that in case of a relatively small data block WD360GD yields only to SCSI drives and RAID 1 array. And when the data blocks are quite large, our hero is the second fastest after the RAID 0 array.

Promise (WB) controller shows even better results here, than during reads.

But look at this drastic write speed drop when we shift from 0.5KB blocks to 1KB blocks! Both WD HDDs seem to dislike the data blocks of this size. It is typical of all latest WD models, so we can call it a family feature :)

It is interesting that as the data block size keeps growing, the write speed onto WD360GD drive almost catches up with the write speed onto RAID0 array of two 7,200rpm IDE drives. And only with larger data blocks RAID 0 arrays managed to get ahead.