Performance in Intel IOMeter DataBase Pattern

As usual let’s start with the longest and more informative benchmark. Here we will check the drives’ ability to work with a mixed stream of reads and writes under five types of workload. All results are summed up in the following table:

Again as usual we will discuss the results of our testing participants on the diagrams. Let’s start with linear workload:

Well,. It seems to me I have already seen something like that (see our review of WD Raptor: First ATA Hard Disk Drive with 10,000rpm Speed for details). At the same time there are a few differences. Due to a radically lower average seek time, WD740GD outperformed all SCSI competitors in RandomRead mode (of course we are only talking about those SCSI drives, which took part in our test session). In those cases when we have writes among the processed requests, the advantage of the WD740GD is also evident, except the RandomWrite mode. I assume that there is no 10K SCSI drive in the market today, which could successfully compete with WD740GD in mixed modes under linear workload.

But what will happen if we increase the workload on the drive?

As the workload grows up, the consequences are inevitable: Ultra/150 CQ of WD740GD either failed or worked inefficiently. While SCSI drives felt at home under heavier workload and immediately sped up. Of course, WD740GD is no competitor to the SCSI solutions any more.

Further workload increase helped WD740GD out, which was quite an unexpected turn for us. Of course, it still yielded to Seagate solutions, but managed to outperform the Hitachi drive in case of large writes share.

So, the results of our database tests demonstrate that CQ support by WD740GD didn’t bring any significant benefits to the drive. Although excellent lazy write algorithms remain really strong weapon of all WD HDDs.