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Testing and Performance Part II

Seagate: Can There Be Only One?
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Iometer is arguably the most widely used storage benchmarking tool. Originally designed by Intel and then released into the open source community, Iometer excels at letting users customize exactly how storage targets should be tested with certain kinds of traffic. In the above graphs, we focused on 4K clusters and examined read/write performance under entirely random or entirely sequential operations. These 4K tests are very common in the benchmarking world and thus serve as a fair comparison against other results likely to be seen around the reviewing world. Random traffic is common when reading or writing many small files in a sustained fashion as well as with servers handling many users.

Examining these 4K graphs, we again see unexpectedly low results from the WD Black on sequential operations. The Black clearly favors random reads and writes. As a drive marketed as a moderate-class mainstream unit, the Blue performs as expected in the middle of the pack. The WD Green pulls out a surprise with its sizable lead on random writes, and Seagate leaves all WD models in the dust on both sequential reads and writes.

However, there’s more to the Iometer story than just 4K operations. We used a custom script from our test lab to collect data for all four drives across a spectrum of data sizes and queue depths. Following is a look at our results for sequential reads and writes.



The story changes a bit, right? The WD Black still lags far behind even the lower RPM Green. Seagate’s Barracuda is clearly the drive to beat up through the 4K range, but once we hit 8K and especially 16K and on, there is essentially no difference in performance between the WD Blue and Seagate Barracuda. This is a bit of good news for WD, which only uses half of the cache that Seagate employs. On the other hand, the Blue costs a bit more and still leaves one to wonder what the point is of having so many different 7200 RPM drive models just to hit the same performance point that Seagate hits with one.