Seagate Desktop 3.5″ 4TB Solid State Hybrid Drive Review

IOMeter

IOMeter is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool for single and clustered systems. It is used as a benchmark and troubleshooting tool and is easily configured to replicate the behaviour of many popular applications. One commonly quoted measurement provided by the tool is IOPS.

IOMeter allows the configuration of disk parameters such as the ‘Maximum Disk Size’, ‘Starting Disk Sector’ and ‘# of Outstanding I/Os’. This allows a user to configure a test file upon which the ‘Access Specifications’ configure the I/O types to the file. Configurable items within the Access Specifications are:

• Transfer Request Size
• Percent Random/Sequential distribution.
• Percent Read/Write Distribution
• Aligned I/O’s.
• Reply Size
• TCP/IP status
• Burstiness

Although Iometer is not a test that I would typically run on a hard drive, the IOPs performance that is recorded on the SSHD is a great example to show that data is being cached. The first chart above shows a typical level of IOPs that we would normally see from a hard drive (in this case the write performance only), whilst the second chart is when reading from the solid state portion of the drive.