I’ve acquired a couple more 2 TB Advanced Format drives: a Seagate Barracuda Green (ST2000DL003) and a Samsung SpinPoint F4 EcoGreen (HD204UI, no data sheet available online).
I was extremely impressed with the Samsung HD204UI. It’s the first AF drive I’ve seen with decent performance. In fact, it’s the fastest disk I’ve tested so far—its unaligned writes are faster than the non-AF Hitachi I used as a reference last time, and its aligned writes are twice as fast.
count size offset step msec tps kBps 131072 1024 0 4096 43984 2979 2979 131072 1024 512 4096 127047 1031 1031 65536 2048 0 8192 14764 4438 8877 65536 2048 512 8192 12453 5262 10524 65536 2048 1024 8192 12460 5259 10518 32768 4096 0 16384 4609 7109 28436 32768 4096 512 16384 7829 4185 16740 32768 4096 1024 16384 8413 3894 15579 32768 4096 2048 16384 8211 3990 15961 16384 8192 0 32768 3952 4145 33165 16384 8192 512 32768 9050 1810 14481 16384 8192 1024 32768 9317 1758 14067 16384 8192 2048 32768 9315 1758 14069 16384 8192 4096 32768 3996 4099 32793
The Seagate ST2000DL003, on the other hand, is so slow it’s not even funny. It’s actually the slowest of all the drives I’ve tested: its performance on aligned random writes is half that of the Western Digital WD20EARS. It’s three times as fast on unaligned writes, but three times nothing (100 kBps) is still nothing (300 kBps) compared to the Samsung HD204UI (15 MBps). Here are the numbers:
count size offset step msec tps kBps 131072 1024 0 4096 2419280 54 54 131072 1024 512 4096 2199286 59 59 65536 2048 0 8192 1283667 51 102 65536 2048 512 8192 985184 66 133 65536 2048 1024 8192 995423 65 131 32768 4096 0 16384 45980 712 2850 32768 4096 512 16384 345291 94 379 32768 4096 1024 16384 432533 75 303 32768 4096 2048 16384 429781 76 304 16384 8192 0 32768 34192 479 3833 16384 8192 512 32768 166440 98 787 16384 8192 1024 32768 210147 77 623 16384 8192 2048 32768 207356 79 632 16384 8192 4096 32768 34221 478 3830
This time, I also ran sequential write tests—basically, dding eight gigabytes’ worth of zeroes to the disk in 128 kB blocks, which is the optimal I/O size for FreeBSD. This time, the results are pretty close: the Samsung HD204UI gets slightly less than 90 MBps, and the Seagate ST2000DL003 gets slightly less than 80 MBps.
Hi des,
Which tool do you use for your tests ? It looks fairly minimal and though efficient for this kind of test.
Thanks.
— Jeremie
I used phybs, which I wrote myself. See my earlier posts for additional information.