Default settings for Basic Disk Tests

[Guest]

Hi,

What are the default settings for the basic disk test in Perfomance Test v. 7.0? There was an older thread with similar question, but when I input those values results are different under Advanced Test and Basic Test. Did the default values change, or my inputting something in wrong place?

Also, which test would you recommend to mimic typical harddisk usage in windows environment, i.e. browsing, running multiple instances of excels, words, dlls in background and other common applications? Synchronous / Asynchronous? Sequential/random? File size / block size?

Would be interesting to see which combination gives the highest speed. From some tests, cashed Win32 API instruction appears to be running almost twice the speed of uncashed for the block size tested.







Thanks,

[Michael (Passmark)]

The settings in your screenshot look like the defaults. However each of the screenshots has a different drive selected (C:, G: and then D. Do you see different values on the same drive. Even if these are partitions on the same physical drive testing different portions of the disk can yield different results.

The "Workstation" preset is the test designed for typical desktop use. Although in reality typical desktop use doesn't hit the drive constantly like these tests do. What you really want on the average desktop system is fast seek times as you're not so much accessing large amounts of data but small amounts of data all over the disk.

The advanced disk test results such as Avg .WAR (average write after read), WAW (average write after write) (all the results measured in ms basically) are the interesting ones for this when combined with tests with high random access. (Lower times are better)

This is the reason solid state hard drives can make a system far more responsive. As with no moving parts they can seek to data much faster then conventional spinning disks.