Benchmark Results: Access Time And I/O Performance
The low-level h2benchw benchmark directly accesses the hard disk, ignoring existing sector alignments through the operating system. That's particularly interesting in this case, because all of the test candidates work with 4 KB sectors, masquerading as 512-byte sectors for the OS. The results are surprising because, while the Seagate Barracuda XT and Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 run at a much higher speed, they occupy the top positions in write speeds and not read speeds.
The test candidates are not designed for file operations that occur in a database, a Web server, or a workstation. Thus, the supposedly-fast 7200 RPM drives are sometimes in front of and sometimes in the middle of the competition, a far cry from a clear victory.