Performance in Intel IOMeter

Sequential Read & Write Patterns

IOMeter is sending a stream of read and write requests with a request queue depth of 4. The size of the requested data block is changed each minute, so that we could see the dependence of the drive’s sequential read/write speed on the size of the data block. This test is indicative of the highest speed the drive can achieve.

The eSATA interface is just incomparable to the USB in processing small data blocks as well as in terms of maximum speed. Perhaps the eSATA controller with its caching algorithms contributes to the high speed with small data chunks. But when it comes to large data blocks, it is purely a battle of interfaces and eSATA wins it easily.

Comparing the USB-connected drives, they are only different in terms of maximum speed. The Transcend is the only one to reach a speed of 30MBps. The Toshiba and the USB-connected 300GB Teac are slow. But the latter delivers superb performance when connected via eSATA.

The HDDs from Teac are beyond competition at writing when connected via eSATA. Take note that the 300GB model is ahead of its 250GB mate by 3MBps at both writing and reading. This difference is due to the speed characteristics of the employed hard disks.

The USB-connected HDDs split up. The two models from Fujitsu show the highest speed but don’t reach 30MBps. The no-name HDD is almost as fast as the leaders but slows down on 64KB data chunks. The Transcend has a lower maximum speed. The USB-connected Teac behaves alike to the Transcend but has problems processing 128KB data blocks. The Toshiba is the worst drive in this test. It achieves its maximum speed on very large data blocks only and is slower than the other HDDs on small ones.