Performance in Intel IOMeter

Multithreaded Read/Write

Multithreaded tests seem to have become quite popular, the users discussing how good Seagate drives are at multithreading, for example. Some distinguished hardware websites have even begun to call IOMeter templates not just “Sequential Read” but “Streaming (Sequential) Read” although it is not quite clear why Streaming and why they increase the queue depth to 64 requests.

So, in this test there are one to four workers, each generating a stream of disk requests. Each worker has a dedicated address zone, so the load on the HDD is quite heavy.

Like in the sequential read and write tests, the HDDs from Samsung and Seagate were tested two times, on the old and new testbed.

When there is only one thread, the test boils down to sequential reading in 64KB blocks.

The best result belongs to the Samsung on the new testbed. The Seagate drives are somewhat slower and do not have any benefits on the new testbed. The HDD from Western Digital is the slowest here.

Now let’s add one more read thread:

The Samsung remains the leader although its speed has lowered considerably. Quite surprisingly, the HDD from Western Digital gets second place. I had not expected it to be so fast here. This proves again that the algorithms of the HDD’s processor are no less important than such parameters as recording density or cache size.

Third place goes to the Seagate working on the new platform although there is again a very small difference in performance of the Seagate drive on the two testbeds. The two drives from Hitachi are the slowest of all, the desktop version beating the server one.

The Seagate team takes top places when reading three threads. Has the developer solved the earlier problems with low performance in multithreaded mode? We’ll see at four threads. One thing you can note here is that the Samsung is a little bit slower on the new testbed.

Despite its position in the middle of the diagram the Western Digital drive is good. It loses less speed than the other drives if compared with its own performance at processing one thread.

The Seagate team is victorious again. The particular models change places in comparison with the three-thread test yet they do not differ much from each other.

The Hitachi drives are at the bottom of the diagram, accompanied by the Samsung tested on the new testbed.