Linux Usage & Performance

For our tests in Linux, the drive was formatted with ReiserFS. The ASRock 4core133-Viiv's Intel P965 chipset is well-supported in Linux, unlike AMD's 780G. This means I'll be able to properly benchmark the hard drives at full speed.

hdparm

hdparm stands for Hard Drive Parameters, and adjusts just that. Specifically, hdparm has a wide set of tools for ATA drives, such as adjusting the DMA. For other drives, the options become much more limited, as they rely more on hardware settings than software. Using the '-t' flag, hdparm returns the buffered disk reads, or essentially the average read speed.

# hdparm -t /dev/sdb
/dev/sdb: 
Timing buffered disk reads:   216MB in  3.05 seconds = 70.82 MB/sec

I repeated the above benchmark several times over, each time with the speeds varying from 68MB/sec to 72MB/sec. I was a little surprised the drive performed better in Linux, but it works for me.

dd Tests

dd takes an input, output, and various sizes and writes to disk. In our case, we always use /dev/zero, since /dev/zero continuously outputs 0 and a fixed rate (much faster than a hard drive can read / write). I'll be copying a little over 4GB to drive to test write performance.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/7K1000/test bs=1024 count=4000000
4.1 GB copied, 110.194 seconds, 38.1 MB/s

Linux' write performance has also slightly outshone Windows. Let's see how the drive holds up in copy tests.

Linux Copy Tests

Much like in Windows, I'll also be testing file copying in Linux. Using the same 750MB movie file, I'll copy the file between the 7K1000 and two Western Digital Raptors in RAID0.

The results from this test are very similar to both the transfer tests in Windows, as well as the results we saw from the previous Linux benchmarks. Again, performance seems to be higher in Linux.