Workstation Pattern

The Workstation pattern simulates the typical load on a workstation at request queue depths up to 32. I performed this test on the full capacity of the drives as well as on 32GB partitions created on them.

To calculate the overall performance rating of a drive in this test, we use the following formula:

Performance = Total I/O (queue=1)/1 + Total I/O (queue=2)/2 + Total I/O (queue=4)/4 + Total I/O (queue=8)/8 + Total I/O (queue=16)/16 + Total I/O (queue=32)/32.

The Western Digital is superior in this test. It delivers the highest overall performance with both USB 2.0 and FireWire 400. Note that the FireWire 800 interface doesn’t improve the overall performance of the WDG1T5000N much.

File Server & Web Server Patterns

These patterns simulate the load typical of the disk subsystems of File and Web servers. The request queue depth is varied from 1 to 256 outstanding requests. The drive’s performance rating is calculated in this test by averaging its speed under all possible loads.

Here are the drives’ ratings in the File Server pattern:

The WDG1T5000N enjoys a complete victory over its opponents irrespective of the interface employed. Note also that the type of the interface has a small effect on the efficiency of the drives.

The results of the Web-Server test are similar to the previous one. The drive from Western Digital is beyond competition and the type of the interface doesn’t influence its performance as well as that of its opponents much.