Test results iozone KByte/s

The test first builds a file 4 GByte big (sequential, initial write) and afterwards there will be read from this file (sequential, read). One step later there will be the same on a random basis to see the influence of the access time (random reads/writes). You can compare 4 KByte block size with a text file with only few letters in it. MP3s and movie files conist of 256 KByte and even bigger blocks. If one for example copies 10'000 text files with a size of 25 MByte it takes much longer than copying a 25 MByte movie file. This is becauseauf of the access time which has a big influence with small files. Big files on the other hand aren't affected by the block size.

The thoughout is very well and the performance in sequential write and read is nearly outstanding. The values are often beyond 100 MByte/s. This doesn't match the proclaimed 115 MByte/s sustained read and write data rates but it is still a very good value compared to the other drives in the test. As expected the performance breaks in when the hard drive does a lot of random read- and random write operations. In this case you can clearly see the influence of 7'200 rpm against 15'000 rpm of a Cheetah high-end disk. You can also see that in random read and write tests the 640 GByte model performs a little worse than the 1.5 TByte derivate. But on the other hand in sequential read tests the smaller disk performs between 2 and 10 percent better.