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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fbottone - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link
Hows about adding a Maxtor SATAII (like Maxline III 300GB) drive to the mix? The SATA-I maxtors do pretty well in certain tests but I'd like to see them compared with the three very good drives already there.BornStar18 - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link
I'm confused by your conclusion on page 5 regarding Office Productivity. Your written statement doesn't support what I'm looking at in the graph. Does the text not refer to graph?100proof - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link
Would it be possible to get an update to this review showcasing some of the real benefits of SATA II?It seems pointless to test these drives individually as it's fairly obvious drives set at the 7200rpm speed will not improve much for indivdual performance.. Raid Arrays are necessary to guage how much of a performance boost the added bw of SATA300 factors into results. It would also be nice to see comparisons of these new SATA II drives in raid set against similar setups of SATA 150/ATA raid arrays. This might be asking too much though...
olly - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link
When you select "Print this article", page 3 onwards the font is too big.Svenna - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link
There is actually no good SATA NCQ conrollers around for the for the amd platform, yet. IMO only the new AHCI controller would be worth testing ncq on :(Aenslead - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link
bah... what a fiasco.Googer - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link
I think this says it all, Raptors are almost extinct. They need to be updated or they will die.The performance they show is poor when compaired to the latest 7200 drives.
greekfragma - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link
couldnt agree more with zax7480.gyuz can u tell us what was wrong with nvidia driver package 6.54 and u tested with a driver that was publiced one year ago ?
plus i like your comment at final words of the article
'' In time, however, we should see improvements in drivers to help reach the true potentials for the new SATA standard.''
thumbs down for this review
jax7480 - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link
I would like to know the reason that make them install such and OLD driver for the Nvidia chipset. Driver 6.39 was released February 2004. This was the first chipset driver for Nforce 4. It was released together with Nforce 4 chipset.Couldn't they just DOWNLOAD a newer one? We are talking about NEW HDD drives here.
cryptonomicon - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link
hmm, i liked this review alot because i can see the performance of alot of common drives on the market today and see their performance in comparison to each other, regardless to what SATA2 is doing.