Page 6 : IO Meter - Random Access Performance

IO Meter (Random Accesses)

We compared the 8 TB Western Digital Gold to the 6 TB Western Digital Black – the fastest desktop-grade hard disk drive in Western Digital’s arsenal. For more performance comparisons, please take a look at The Hard Disk Drive Performance Comparison Guide.

 

Random Throughput

Test	WD Gold (8 TB)	WD Black (6 TB)	Difference
512 KB Read	31.86 MB/s	31.97 MB/s	– 0.3%
512 KB Write	31.34 MB/s	28.54 MB/s	+ 9.8%
4 KB Read	0.32 MB/s	0.32 MB/s	–
4 KB Write	0.74 MB/s	0.39 MB/s	+ 89.7%

Check out the incredible boost in the random write speed, especially for small random writes. The 8TB WD Gold delivered almost double the performance of the 6TB WD Black drive in small random writes, and a 10% boost in performance in large random writes.

This is the key advantage of the HGST media caching technology that Western Digital included into the 8TB WD Gold. This is a tremendous performance advantage in file storage servers that serve hundreds or thousands of users.

 

Random Access Time

Test	WD Gold (8 TB)	WD Black (6 TB)	Difference
512 KB Read	16.45 ms	16.39 ms	+ 0.3%
512 KB Write	16.73 ms	18.36 ms	– 8.9%
4 KB Read	12.81 ms	12.79 ms	+ 0.1%
4 KB Write	5.54 ms	10.50 ms	– 47.3%

As you can see, the HGST media caching technology truly has a significant effect on performance. It cut down the random access time, even though that’s a limitation imposed by physics.

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Random CPU Utilization

Test	WD Gold (8 TB)	WD Black (6 TB)	Difference
512 KB Read	0.56 %	0.60 %	– 6.7%
512 KB Write	0.57 %	0.62 %	– 8.1%
4 KB Read	0.35 %	0.43 %	– 18.6%
4 KB Write	0.53 %	0.37 %	+ 43.2%

The LSI 7101B hard disk drive controller used in the 8TB WD Gold is definitely more powerful than the LSI TT07143 controller used in the 6TB Western Digital Black. The extra processing power was certainly useful in handling the extra media caching duty.

Next Page > IOMeter – Sequential Access Performance

 

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