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Hard Drive Benchmarks

Over 1,000,000 Hard Drives Benchmarked

Hard Drive Test Information

Hard Drive Benchmark results (“Baselines”) were gathered from users’ submissions to the PassMark web site as well as from internal testing. PerformanceTest conducts a series of different tests and then averages the results together to determine the PassMark Disk Mark for a system.

The test duration depends on the selected duration in the PerformanceTest settings and will be between 18 and 120 seconds. These standard tests have been defined below.

Disk Sequential Read

A large test file is created on the disk under test (1 GB for non solid state drives, 2 GB for solid state drives). The file is read sequentially from start to end using a 32KB block size. The test uses uncached asynchronous file operations (with an IO queue length of 20). Note that certain O/S features like file system compression, and settings in the PerformanceTest preferences window can alter the file size and test duration. The result is reported in MBytes/sec.

Disk Sequential Write

A large file is written to the disk under test (400 MB for non solid state drives, 800 MB for solid state drives). The file is written sequentially from start to end using a 32KB block size. Test conditions are otherwise the same as the read test.

Disk Random Seek RW (IOPS 32KQD20)

A large test file is created on the disk under test (400 MB for non solid state drives, 800 MB for solid state drives). The file is read randomly; a seek is performed to move the file pointer to a random position in the file, a 32KB block is read or written then another seek is performed using a queue depth of 20. The amount of data actually transferred is highly dependent on the disk seek time.

IOPS 4KQD1

Similar to the IOPS 32KQD20 test but uses 4KB blocks and a queue depth of 1.

Disk Mark

This is the number reported in the benchmark charts. It is an straight average of the three values above. The average is then scaled up by multiplying the average with a 'magic' number in order to make the number larger. The larger number is better when it comes time to combine all the mark values to form the system's PassMark rating.