IOMeter - Transaction rate
IOMeter presents a good test case for command queuing and non-sequential read/write performance. To keep things easy to read, we've busted out two sets of graphs here. The first includes the Spinpoint and its closest competitors, while the second has results for all the drives we've tested. With over two dozen drives, those latter graphs are a little difficult to read, so we'll focus our attention on the first set and the F1's direct rivals.

Western Digital's latest Caviar has been trading blows back and forth with Samsung's SpinPoint F1, but when we turn our attention to IOMeter transaction rates, the SE16 is clearly superior. The drive's performance scales up much more aggressively as the load increases, easily outpacing the F1 from one outstanding I/O all the way up to 256. Note that the 640GB SE16 isn't the fastest drive of the lot, though. In fact, it's actually a step behind the older Caviar SE16 750GB.

Good luck with these, folks.