File Copying Olympics: How File Size Impacts the Race for Performance Gold
I had the opportunity to evaluate the new U34 Bolt from Oyen, and I was only disappointed that this device doesn't literally scream or burn a hole through the desk. While delivering a stunning 3.1GB/s of sustained throughput, it was completely silent and no warmer than a cup of coffee (120°F/49°C). As exciting as that was, though, I thought this would be a good opportunity to explore why we don't always see peak performance from a storage device.
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Interface performance vs. device performance vs. filesystem performance vs. software performance
Perhaps once a month we'll get a comment, "Black Magic Speed Test shows XX MB/s, but the backup only gets YY MB/s. What gives?". Less frequently people will wonder how to find that 40Gb/s performance that Thunderbolt boasts. First, let's address the math that may not be obvious. "Gb/s" is not the same as "GB/s"; Gb/s is "Gigabits per second", GB/s is "Gigabytes per second". There are 8 bits in a byte, so 40Gb/s is comparable to 5GB/s. But, interface performance isn't...