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
Real World Tests - File System Tasks
Synthetic benchmarks are not always the best gauge in measuring the "real" performance of hardware which is why we have incorporated a few real world tests in our storage reviews. One of our tests, the file system performance test, measures the drive's ability to handle file zip, unzip, and copy operations. This is a great measure of how one drive compares to another and we have put together a group of tasks which most of us typically use.
1. File Zip Test - We take a 300MB file and measure the time it takes for our test bed to compress it to ZIP format on our test drive. We then run the test again with 300 1MB files to see how the drive performs when working with multiple files.
2. File Unzip Test - Using the same methodology as the File Zip Test, we take a ZIP file of a single 300MB file as well as a ZIP file of 300 1MB files and measure the time it takes to uncompress each ZIP successfully.
3. File Copy Test - We measure how long it takes for the system with our test drive to copy a single 300MB file as well as 300 1MB files to a separate folder on the hard drive.
Take a look at the results...
Our results for the file system task benchmarks did not really favor any of the SATA300 drives, but rather scattered the units across the charts. These tests show how each drive handles the various tasks of day to day file system operations.
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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.