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Date |
: Dec 15th, 2001 |
| Category |
: Storage |
| Manufacturer |
: Western Digital |
| Author |
: Jin-Wei Tioh |
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| HDD |
Disk
Access Time |
Disk
Read/Transfer Rate |
| Beginning |
End |
| IBM
Deskstar 60GXP (40.0GB ATA-100) |
12.3 |
39800 |
21100 |
| Quantum
Fireball Plus AS (20.0GB ATA-100) |
13.5 |
36000 |
21100 |
| Seagate
Barracuda ATA IV (80.0GB ATA-100) |
14.9 |
42500 |
27200 |
| Western
Digital Caviar WD1000BB (100.0GB ATA-100) |
13.7 |
41400 |
27700 |
| Western
Digital Caviar WD1200BB (120.0GB ATA-100) |
13.5 |
48300 |
28600 |
The WD1200BB fares better than the WD1000BB by a hair : 0.2ms. Subtracting 4.2ms of rotational latency gives us a measured seek time of 9.3ms, a little off Western Digital's claim of 8.9ms. No drive seems to be able to beat the Deskstar 60GXP in terms of seek time, a critical factor in IOMeter performance.
STR is a whole different ball game. The WD1200BB roars by the Barracuda IV by 14% in the outer-zone STR measurements, some 5.8MB/s! A new inner-zone record of 28.6MB/s is also set by the WD1200BB. Clearly, the Caviar is the new 7200RPM STR king.
It has been argued that a drive's seek time matters less in the average workstation of today. With the abundance of main system RAM, the OS has ample room for implementing its own disk cache. It has been hashed out on the StorageReview forums that a drive's caching algorithms, buffer size and short-seeks together play a more important role than seek time, spindle speed or transfer rate! However, this differs from a server scenario, where heavy disk access is the norm. Here, minimizing seek time is the prime concern, and this is where SCSI drives typically excel. Therefore, WinBench 99's Disk WinMarks are more indicative of workstation performance, whereas IOMeter can be taken more as a server performance indicator.
Without further ado, let's move on to the higher-level benchmarks.
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