SATA II to the Power of 3.0Gb/sec: Three Drives Reviewed
by Purav Sanghani on June 25, 2005 7:06 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Overall System Performance - SYSMark 2004
SYSMark 2004 is divided into two separate suites: Internet Content Creation and Office Productivity. What makes SYSMark an ideal hard disk benchmark is that its scores are totals of response times, meaning that the benchmark measures how long the system takes to respond to a task (e.g. how long before a search and replace is completed after it is initiated) and sums up all such response times to generate a score. This score is generated for six total subcategories: three under Internet Content Creation and three under Office Productivity.
For the most part, SYSMark is CPU/platform bound, but we will see some variations in performance according to disk speed; at the same time, there are a couple of benchmarks within SYSMark that are heavily disk dependent.
Internet Content Creation Performance
Our results showed very little difference in the performance of the competitors; not enough to rule out margin of error in the Content Creation part of SYSMark 2004. The scores for the majority of drives landed between 180-183 which does not show too well which drive performs better than the rest.
Office Productivity Performance
SYSMark's Office Productivity suite consists of three tests, the first of which is the Communication test. The Communication test consists of the following:
"The user receives an email in Outlook 2002 that contains a collection of documents in a zip file. The user reviews his email and updates his calendar while VirusScan 7.0 scans the system. The corporate web site is viewed in Internet Explorer 6.0. Finally, Internet Explorer is used to look at samples of the web pages and documents created during the scenario."
Surprisingly the SATA300 drives showed a good performance increase over the SATA150 drives as our 3 test units topped the charts with Western Digital coming in at first followed by Hitachi and Samsung.
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100proof - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link
Above post was for Kristopher.. :D100proof - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link
For all intents and purposes the Sata II designation from my original post was used just for familiarity.. This is how these current drives are advertised and sold, but I'm aware of the name change and did happen to catch the Sata-IO article here on AT. :) Thanks for looking out though :)greekfragma - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link
I am still waiting for an answer why they didnt install 6.54 chipset drivers packet instead of 6.39 that is last year's............hilarious the ending of the article......i post it once more to be more understood with the things i wrote above.
"In time, however, we should see improvements in drivers to help reach the true potentials for the new SATA standard."
plz answer
sprockkets - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link
Nvm, reading their tech docs state it is 1.5gbits per a second, but figure 80% throughput due to its 8b10b encoding and then divide by 8 for the 150MB xfer rate, so it would assume then the new rate is 300MB from a total of 3.0gb per second.It has already been proven NCQ does nothing for the desktop at storagereview.com and decreases performance for non server use. Having twice the bandwidth doesn't help whnen these drives put out a constant 40-70MB anyhow, and burst maybe around over a hundred.
sprockkets - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link
I don't understand why they say 3.0Gb when the old spec was 150MB a second, shouldn't that mean GB instead of Gb? Doesn't the B being capital mean it should be bytes and not the G?Mariosalice - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link
The latest WidowsXP64 Nvidia drivers for AMD are 6.39 and for Windows XP32 are 6.53Mariosalice - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link
I would appreciate a SATA II hard disk (raid0 bootable vs single drive vs SATA I)review based on a testbed with dual core Athlon 64, on an nforce4 mobo with windows XP 64 and 6.53 drivers. This is the near future I think.As for the tests, just use what you would to compare single vs dual core processors.
One suggestion. Avast supports 64 bit Windows and you get it for free so you may use it for your tests. Then we may talk how better or not is SATA II compared to SATA I.
Olaf van der Spek - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link
#34> You'd be looking at a minimum of four drives in a striped-array to reach those sort of speeds
Eh, you do know that SATA is point to point by default and that the interface only becomes a bottleneck if port multipliers are being used, do you?
PrinceGaz - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link
It should be pretty obvious to all regular AT readers that the increased transfer rate of SATA II will have a negligible effect except with striped or other RAID arrays that can offer over about 150MB/s sustained transfer-rate. You'd be looking at a minimum of four drives in a striped-array to reach those sort of speeds, which is not something most people have. All SATA II does with these drives in any normal situation is allow them to transfer data to and from their 8MB cache a bit quicker, which isn't going to make any noticeable real-world difference.I don't have an nVidia chipset so your using the v6.39 chipset drivers didn't mean anything to me, but if they are as old as some here have said, it does throw a big question-mark over whether the results would be the same with the latest drivers.
As for the benefits of NCQ and the apparent disadvantages of it in many of the tests in this report, all I'll say is Pentium D and Athlon 64 X2. All the disk-intensive multi-tasking benchmarks with those showed major gains with NCQ enabled drives, because the processor was requesting totally seperate data simultaneously while running two threads, whereas a single-core CPU is only running a single task at once and therefore is never truly multi-tasking.
Good review though, all the graphs worked for me. I'm happy with my Maxtor drives which (touch wood) have served me flawlessly for many years and I've never had a single failure. It's tempting fate saying that but I recently backed everything important up so a drive throwing in the towel wouldn't be a total nightmare.
I still maintain the major advantage of SATA (I or II) is the smaller cables. I look forward to building my next box where the only ribbon cables have to be routed up to the optical drives.
KristopherKubicki - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link
100proof: Have you read http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=24...SATAII is a myth....
Kristopher