- Tests
Our tests begin with the reading and writing benchmarks. The hard disk installed
in the One Touch unit we received was the Maxtor DiamondMax 10, with 300GB
capacity, Parallel ATA 133, 7200 rpm and an average seek time up to 9 msec.
In the Disk Speed Reading and Writing test graphs below, the vertical axis
(Y axis) displays megabytes transferred while the horizontal axis (X axis)
shows
the
time period
in milliseconds.
Hence, the graphs indicate the transfer rate in MB/s.
A large test file is created on the disk under test. The size of this test
file is proportional to the amount of RAM available, which stops the entire
file from being cached in RAM. The file is read sequentially from start to
end. The amount of data read in each individual read operation is always 16KB.
This graph shows the MB/Sec disk write rate over the period of time required to write over 200MB to a hard drive. Cacheing allows the rate to start very high then drop off as the cache fills and the drive can't keep up. In fact, for writing large files cacheing can even cause a decrease in performance (compared to the uncached performance). The cache becomes an overhead in this case.
HD Tach tests the sequential read, random access and interface burst speeds
of your attached storage device (hard drive, flash drive, removable drive,
etc). All drive technologies such as SCSI, IDE/ATA, 1394, USB, SATA and RAID
are supported. Test results from HD Tach can be used to confirm manufacturer
specs, analyze your system for proper performance, and compare your performance
with others.
This benchmark is intended to determine the maximum read or write speed on
the device at various locations. Hard drives, for example, have faster read/write
speeds at the inside edge (mapped to block 0) of the device, so it is useful
to see the difference in speed. The maximum sustained speed (lowest speed on
the device) is an important metric for real time sequential access applications.
The maximum speed may be important to a power user that would like to partition
the drive into a high speed partition and low speed partition.
The Maxtor gives
a very stable performance graph that remains over 29 MB/s throughout its
entire capacity.
The High-End and Business WinMark99 tests gave us very good results. This
shows the good job that Maxtor has done with the One Touch II unit.
