Not All 500 GB Hard Drives Are Created Equal

Access Time And I/O Performance

The difference in access time isn’t significant, but certainly welcome.

I/O Performance

A value of 27% more I/O performance between one hard drive generation and the next is quite a difference, and is atypical.

File server I/O performance increased by almost the same amount.

Web server I/O access patterns deal with lots of small files and almost entirely with random reads, which is why the increased throughput doesn’t help as much as on the file server benchmark, where larger blocks are read. Even so, the Spinpoint M7 benefits, thanks to its quicker average access time.