Passmark Advanced Multi-User Tests

Version and / or Patch Used: 6.1
Developer Homepage: http://www. passmark.com
Test Homepage: http://www.passmark.com

Many users complain that I/O Meter is too complicated of a benchmark to replicate results so my quest to find an alternative was started. Passmark has added several multi-user tests that measure a hard drives ability to operate in a multi-user environment.

The tests use different settings to mimic basic multi-user operations as they would play out on your server. Variances is read / write percentage as well as random / sequential reads are common in certain applications, Web Servers read nearly 100% of the time while Database Servers write a small amount of data.

The Workstation test is the only single user environment and will be similar to how you use your system at home.

Passmark's Advanced Server Tests have done a really good job with the solid state drives, but here I have to admit that I was expecting a wider range of numbers. We have always known that this test was brutal and that each tenth of a megabyte was more than just a small performance increase.

Keeping that in mind, we do see the scaling like we should with the 7,200 and 10K drive, but the controller didn't seem to help with a single disk. When we started using the 15K.7 in RAID the performance numbers shot up faster than your Facebook friend count would after winning the lottery. There will be more on that topic soon when the benchmark results are all accounted for.