|
HITACHI E7K1000
Hitachi recently updated
its line of Terabyte-drives with the brand-new
E7K1000, featuring more reliability and more
performance with fewer platters. Today, we
will take a look at four units, and see how they
perform in various RAID levels, as well as
individually. The
first-generation 7K1000 can be found here, for
comparison.
Here are its specs:
Interesting how this drive shows 24x7
availability
Our test platform is as
follows:
Now we go to the
individual drive test results:
HDTach 3.0.4.0, 32MB Zones
HDTach 3.0.4.0, VAR Zones
Atto Disk Benchmark
Wow, these are great numbers Hitachi! We
see a 40+ MB/s increase over the older 7K1000.
Very impressive.
Next, we put 4x in RAID-0:
HDTach 3.0.4.0, 32MB Zones
HDTach 3.0.4.0, VAR Zones
Atto Disk Benchmark
Never before did we
think that putting four drives in RAID-0 would
result in a linear, quadrupling of performance.
Well, that's what we see here in the HDTach results.
The Atto numbers clearly show some caching going on,
but nevertheless, these results are very interesting
indeed.
Next, we put the same
four drives in a RAID-5 array:
HDTach 3.0.4.0, 32MB Zones
HDTach 3.0.4.0, VAR Zones
Atto Disk Benchmark
Again, we see results
consistent with the number of members in the array.
Four drives in a RAID-5 removes one drive
effectively because of distributed parity, leaving
you with three. These numbers show an
approximate tripling of the individual drive's
measurements.
Lastly, we examine
RAID-6 performance:
HDTach 3.0.4.0, 32MB Zones
HDTach 3.0.4.0, VAR Zones
Atto Disk Benchmark
Again, we see sensible
results in the HD Tach tests, where two of the four
drives are utilized for parity. Interestingly,
Atto write scores have shot up, most likely because
of caching within the RAID controller.
Well, Hitachi has once
again managed to improve on existing designs,
pushing the envelope of performance and reliability.
The E7K1000 improves on the 7K1000's mediocre
performance with stellar results, never before seen
with desktop drives. We hope to see more great
things like this from Hitachi in the near future.
|
