HDDs, The Next Generation: Drives With 4KB Sectors On The Way

Benchmark Results: Access Time And I/O Performance

Read access time is at a rather normal level on the EARS drive.

Write access time shows what the impact of 4KB sectors can be. Our access time results from the h2benchw tool were generated through physical access to the hard drive, not utilizing any file system. Real world access time is not impacted this way on a properly-aligned Windows XP system or under Windows Vista/7.

Iometer should have shown similar performance drops, since it doesn’t align to data blocks as governed by the operating system. However, the benchmark can be forced to align its writes in selectable blocks.