Drive Performance Per Watt
Streaming Reads Performance per Watt
Again, the fast mode clearly required a bit less power in dealing with sequential workloads.
Since performance does not change for streaming reads…
… the performance per watt ratio resulted in a better result for the drive using fast mode, since it required a bit less power using this setting. However, the difference is small.
Workstation I/O Performance per Watt
Here is more proof of slower head movement when the drive is set to quiet mode. In our workstation I/O test, the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B delivered fewer I/O operations per second compared to fast mode.
This result was as expected and perfectly clear: the Hitachi drive set to fast mode requires more power for I/O intensive tasks than when it is set to quiet mode. The difference was 1.1 W on our test system.
As a result of the power savings compared with a relatively small performance difference, the quiet mode comes out on top, and actually provides a better performance per watt ratio on workstation I/O workloads than the drive’s fast mode!