Intel IOMeter: WorkStation

WD2500JB is targeted at workstations, so here it must do its utmost. The features of the Workstation pattern – a bigger share of write requests and “smaller” average request size – allow WD drives to show their best.

And they did it! The drives from Western Digital are far ahead of the competitors under smaller workloads! Only IBM drive can compete with them, but the strong point of this product (Tagged Command Queuing) works only under high workloads, which don’t often occur during regular work of a desktop PC.

As for Maxtor, it once again showed different performance with different controllers. It’s also characteristic that the biggest gap between the two controllers takes place when the queue depth reaches 16 requests.

Still, we are now interested in the HDDs rating, rather than in the dependence of Maxtor cache-buffer segmentation on the UDMA mode… We will calculate the performance rating in the WorkStation pattern with 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.

Well, the WD drives pass the WorkStation pattern with flying colors: they won the two top places. And if there were WD1800JB…

WinBench99 2.0

After the success in Workstation pattern, let’s see what the WD drives are going to show us in WinBench99 tests.

Well, I have hoped for something more than that. Although WD2500JB outran WD2000JB in the High-End Disk WinMark test, they both have a long way to go before they reach IBM and Maxtor. In the Business Disk WinMark all the drives show similar performance, so there is no definite leader.

To be objective, we should note that very large drives can’t show their true potential here, because we format them for WinBench tests as one logical partition of the full drive’s capacity. So, such gigantic drives have very large FAT (in FAT32) or MTF-files (in NTFS), which negatively tells on their performance…

On the other hand, the competitor drives with similar storage capacities performed much better in WinBench99.

Let’s now turn to NTFS (I hope you remember that this file system “favors” WD drives).

Yeah, WD2500JB is better in NTFS and it nearly caught up with the IBM drive in the High-End Disk WinMark.

In conclusion here is the linear read graph for WD2500JB.