Sequential Performance – HDTach, HDTune, File Copy, YAPT (sequential)

We have shifted over to combining our results into two groupings for consumer reviews. First up is sequential performance:

HDTune:

HDTune tests a similar level of features as compared with HDTach, but with a different access pattern. Thus provides us with an additional set of benchmark numbers to compare between storage configurations. CPU utilization has proven negligible with modern processing horsepower, and is no longer included. Additionally, we do not include write performance due to HDTune's write access pattern not playing nicely with most SSDs we have tested it on.

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The big takeaway here is that the maximum and average speeds of these two new models hits one big milestone – they are the first to exceed the throughputs of the 1TB Velociraptor we reviewed back in 2012. The minimum (end of the disk) rates still fall shy of that 10k RPM unit as it had a narrower sweep across its tracks and therefore a lower linear velocity delta as compared to these 3.5" drive platters.

PCPer File Copy Test

Our custom PCPer-FC test does some fairly simple file creation and copy routines in order to test the storage system for speed.  The script creates a set of files of varying sizes, times the creation process, then copies the same files to another partition on the same hard drive and times the copy process.  There are four file sizes that we used to try and find any strong or weak points in the hardware: 10 files @ 1000 MB each, 100 files @ 100 MB each, 500 files @ 10 MB each and 1000 files at 1 MB each.

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The Velociraptor gets beaten in a few more tests here.

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The added cache and throughputs of these new models make a much larger dent in our file copy tests, as we are copying *from* and *to* the drive simultaneously. Smaller files were the only place where the Velociraptor still dominates.

YAPT:

YAPT (yet another performance test) is a benchmark recommended by a pair of drive manufacturers and was incredibly difficult to locate as it hasn't been updated or used in quite some time.  That doesn't make it irrelevant by any means though, as the benchmark is quite useful.  It creates a test file of about 100 MB in size and runs both random and sequential read and write tests with it while changing the data I/O size in the process.  The misaligned nature of this test exposes the read-modify-write performance of SSDs and Advanced Format HDDs.

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Scaling was as expected here with these faster drives under YAPT. The larger gains in writes are partially due to the increased cache size available on these new models (more on that on the next page).

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