Maxtor's MaXLine III 250GB: Bringing 16MB Buffers and NCQ to Hard Drives
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 25, 2004 12:03 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Pure Hard Disk Performance
To measure "pure" hard disk performance, we took a real world benchmark - in this case, the entire Winstone 2004 suite - and used Intel's IPEAK utility to capture a trace file of all of the IO operations that take place during a single run of Business Winstone 2004 and MCC Winstone 2004. We then use IPEAK to play back the trace, much like a timedemo, on each of the hard drives, which gives us a mean service time in milliseconds; in other words, the average time that each drive took to fulfill each IO operation.In order to make the data more understandable, we report the scores as an average number of IO operations per second so that higher scores translate into better performance.
Keep in mind that these performance scores are best only for comparing pure hard disk performance, and in no way do they reflect the actual real world performance impact of these hard drives.
For descriptions of what the Business and Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 tests consist of, reference those benchmark pages.
With NCQ enabled, we have a new record; the MaXLine III is able to beat even the almighty Western Digital Raptor. This just goes to show the tremendous performance impact of a 16MB buffer on desktop application performance. The impact of NCQ is negligible, but it's what puts the MaXLine III over the edge as the new king of this benchmark.
We see continued dominance in the Content Creation Winstone IPEAK test, but what about in the real world?
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araczynski - Friday, June 25, 2004 - link
yawn,if ncqprice <= raptorprice then
ncqproduct = possiblesuccess
else
whocares = 1
endif
I would say forget the spinning crap alltogether, why aren't we advnacing the solid state field storage? like that HyperDrive3 thing mentioned on the forums, THAT'S something to drool about.
Da3dalus - Friday, June 25, 2004 - link
I wanna see a Raptor with that 16MB buffer ;)I'm not gonna put a Maxtor drive in my comp again no matter what they come up with, bad previous experiences...
Demon - Friday, June 25, 2004 - link
The Seagate 7200.7 does support NCQ."The Barracuda 7200.7 is the industry's first hard drive family capable of supporting SATA Native Command Queuing (NCQ)"
http://www.seagate.com/cda/newsinfo/newsroom/relea...
apriest - Friday, June 25, 2004 - link
#4, I believe the drive has to support NCQ as well. Doesn't the Raptor support NCQ though?Zar0n - Friday, June 25, 2004 - link
Why did u not benchmark Seagate 7200.7 with NCQ enabled?1GB of ram? Most users have 256mb or 512mb.
What is the technical explanation for some many tests being slower with NCQ?
AnnoyedGrunt - Friday, June 25, 2004 - link
Hmmm, I thought the conclusion in this article gave too much credit to NCQ as far as boosting performance. It helped in one test which has significant multi-tasking, and that is by no means a bad thing, but I do wonder how often that scenario would arise. It seems to me that the human operating the computer would have a hard time keeping that many activities occuring @ the same time. Also, the Hitachi drive (as well as the other 7200 RPM drives) were all usually quite close in performance to the new Maxtor. Finally, in the game loading tests, the Raptor still had a significant lead, which is somewhat dissapointing for me since that is my main concern and I was hoping the Maxtor would do better in that arena.Well, I'll check out the storagereview article to see how that turned out.
-D'oh!
Sivar - Friday, June 25, 2004 - link
Hmm. The results using a Promise TCQ controller were quite different (See StorageReview.com's latest review).Jeff7181 - Friday, June 25, 2004 - link
Well it had to happen sometime... competition for the Raptor.