X-bit labs

Western Digital Scorpio 2.5” HDD: Better Late Than Never (page 7)

Category: Storage

by Andrey Kuznetcov

[ 04/06/2005 | 04:22 PM ]

Performance in FC-Test

We used FC-test to measure the real practical performance of our testing participants. Let me remind you once again that the credible performance measurements are guaranteed by the working principles of this software we developed in our labs for HDD testing. The main idea of FC-Test is to measure the time the hard disk drives need to create (write), read and copy file sets, which differ from one another by the type, size and number of files. Then we calculate the practical performance of the drive basing on the time measurements.

As you remember from our previous HDD reviews, Windows and Programs patterns include a large number of smaller files, and the remaining three patterns – ISO, MP3 and Install – work with a limited number of larger files. For copy operations each drive is formatted into two 32GB equal logical partitions. The patterns are copied either within the same partition or from one partition to another.

First of all let’s see how the drives behave in FAT32 file system. The first diagram represents the file creation (writing) speeds. Western Digital WD800VE can be considered a winner summing up its results in all five patterns. It feels especially confident in patterns working with larger files winning the first prize in both of them.

The next diagram represents file reading. In this case WD drive doesn’t perform that convincing. In most cases it falls behind the Seagate and Hitachi solutions.

Copy near (within a single partition) pushes Scorpio drive to the last position in almost all cases. It manages to outperform Seagate drive only once in Windows pattern.

On the last diagram for this batch we see that WD drive is again the slowest. This time in all five patterns.