File System Test
With the idea that each OS uses a different file system, I figured a simple test for the file system performance could help determine how this could impact other tests. The test involves using the native functions of the operating system to select files from a remote drive, copying them to the local drive and timing how long it takes. Since this uses functions native to both operating systems, there is no emulation on the Mac side.
Test Steps
- Attach 250GB USB 2.0 hard drive to Mac Mini
- Select directory that contains roughly 8,000 files (9.5GB) in various directories
- Copy selected directory onto the native hard drive partition
- Time start of copy to completion
Results
- Mac OS X – 16m 3s
- Windows XP – 12m 21s
The results of this test show that the Windows NTFS file system appears to be faster at the basic function of writing data to the hard drive when compared to the Mac HPFS+ file system. This is likely due to the fact that the NTFS file system does not have as many features as the HPFS+ system. Of course, this was also a test that featured far more data than a user normally will deal with at once.
Still, users should be aware that disk intensive tasks can be slower on the Mac OS X native file system compared to the Windows native file system. The fact that the Mac Mini uses a notebook hard drive also means that performance will be slower than most desktop computer systems.
