While I agree with bimble's comment about the test not being very scientific, I'm not sure that it's "utter nonsense". It's a person's first impression from using both Linode and Slicehost.

Eivind Uggedal has already beaten scientific comparison to death: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=966555

Yes, so what do we need this, I repeat, utter nonsense for?

hdparm is not a benchmark. Not even close. He could just as well have posted "the linode green looks faster than the slicehost blue".

Not only that, but it's also out-of-date; Linode now has one-click backups, in contrast to what this blog post claims (though it was correct when written back in Dec 2009).

they are file based backups and not snapshot backups.

from: http://www.linode.com/backups/

Files that have been modified, but are the same length and without any metadata changes (like mtime) will not be considered "changed" during a subsequent incremental backup. Currently, only ext2/3 volumes can be backed up (this limitation may be removed in an upcoming release). ACLs and extended attributes are NOT tracked.

The slice version is: http://www.slicehost.com/questions/#backups

Linode's backup system includes a snapshot which can be triggered whenever you like, as well as the scheduled incremental backups.

The UI looks like this: http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/3251/linodebackups.png