Programs and Windows Patterns
And now we will discuss the most interesting case – the processing of small and very small files. The Programs file-set consists of 8504 files totaling 1380MB. The Windows file-set includes 9006 files with a total size of 1060MB.
If you analyze the results of the ISO, MP3 and Install patterns, you can see that the Samsung HDDs prefer to process lots of small files rather than a few large ones, and now the SP2514N shows its best. It is almost 20% faster than its closest pursuer WD2500KS in the Windows pattern! The WD2500JS enjoys a confident third place but there are changes in the lower places. The second and third revision Maxtor DiamondMax 10 drives are losing their positions, allowing to be overtaken by the Hitachi Deskstar T7K250. Seagate’s HDDs are obviously not enthusiastic about this kind of load, delivering the worst results of all.
The Maxtor DiamondMax 10 is better at reading many small files than at writing them. The WD2500JS and WD2500KS are, on the contrary, slow, being even slower than their own predecessors. The Samsung SP2514N wins both of the patterns, and one of the Hitachi HDDs has done well in this test, too. Let’s see what we have in the copying tests.
That’s the moment of truth: the drives that failed the reading and writing tests cannot provide a high copying speed. The only Maxtor drive to look more or less competitive against the teams of Samsung, Seagate and Hitachi is the 6B250S0 model. The others are at the bottom of the list, competing only with the Seagate ST3250824A.
When copying to another partition, the same Maxtor even takes third place, being only inferior to the Samsung SP2514N and Seagate ST3250624AS. We can also see the loser now. It is the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9. The Samsung SP2504C is on the losing side, too, yet another time.
We should note that the inadequate results of some HDDs (particularly, the results of the Hitachi HDT722525DLA380 in comparison with the HDT722525DLAT80) are likely to be due to the deterioration of the state of the particular HDD sample during our tests.
