X-bit labs

WD740GD aka Raptor 2 Hard Disk Drive Review (page 8)

Category: Storage

by Nikita Nikolaichev

[ 02/18/2004 | 11:37 PM ]

Performance in Intel IOMeter Sequential Read & Write Patterns

Now let’s see how WD740GD copes with sequential reading and writing. To check this out we will be sending read and write requests (with the queue depth equal to 4) with sequentially growing address. Once a minute we will change the data block size. This testing will show us the dependence of the read/write speed on the size of the requested data block.

Here are the results obtained for sequential reading:

It is evident that WD740GD is not any slower than any of the participating SCSI drives. It actually outperforms them quite a bit. :)

At the same time, all three SCSI drives worked faster with 8KB data blocks than WD740GD. This is a pretty interesting result, as WD740GD has always been beyond any competition when working with larger data blocks. The processing of large data blocks shows very clearly how big the linear read speed difference between the two Raptor generations is.

Now let’s take a look at sequential writing:

During writing WD740GD proved nearly perfect. Although it appeared a little slower than Hitachi HDD on small data blocks, it outperforms the latter once the data blocks size increases. At the same time we can also see that its write speed on 32KB and 64KB data blocks got somewhat slower.