Page 7 : IO Meter - Sequential Access Performance

IO Meter (Sequential 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.

 

Sequential Throughput

Test	WD Gold (8 TB)	WD Black (6 TB)	Difference
512 KB Read	209.29 MB/s	225.60 MB/s	– 7.2%
512 KB Write	209.89 MB/s	228.38 MB/s	– 8.5%
4 KB Read	90.87 MB/s	94.82 MB/s	– 4.2%
4 KB Write	53.91 MB/s	84.54 MB/s	– 36.2%

The WD Gold 8TB datacenter drive uses less dense platters, so its sequential throughput is understandably lower than that of the 6TB Western Digital Black. That would account for about a 5% deficit in performance, with the rest due to the drive being optimised for random writes.

In fact, we can see here that the HGST media caching technology actually results in a large drop in small sequential write performance.

 

Sequential Access Time

Test	WD Gold (8 TB)	WD Black (6 TB)	Difference
512 KB Read	2.50 ms	2.32 ms	+ 7.8%
512 KB Write	2.51 ms	2.29 ms	+ 9.4%
4 KB Read	0.04 ms	0.04 ms	+ 4.2%
4 KB Write	0.08 ms	0.05 ms	+ 56.4%

No surprises here. The 8TB WD Gold is optimised for small random writes, not small sequential writes.

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Sequential CPU Utilization

Test	WD Gold (8 TB)	WD Black (6 TB)	Difference
512 KB Read	1.25 %	1.33%	– 6.0%
512 KB Write	1.41 %	1.50%	– 6.0%
4 KB Read	8.66 %	8.95%	– 3.2%
4 KB Write	8.59 %	9.23%	– 6.9%

Again, we can see that the LSI 7101B hard disk drive controller used in the 8TB WD Gold is more powerful than the LSI TT07143 controller used in the 6TB Western Digital Black.

Next Page > IOPS Random Scaling Performance

 

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