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 - Application Load Times
In our Application Load Time tests, we measure the time it takes for each application to startup. For example, our benchmarking tool begins the stopwatch as soon as PhotoShopCS.exe is run and stops after the application has finished loading all of the plugins and filters and shuts down. We take the average of 3 runs with system reboots and hard disk defragmentations before each test run.
Application Load Times (average, seconds) |
|||||||
NCQ/TCQ Status |
PhotoShop CS |
Word 2003 |
Excel 2003 |
Access 2003 |
PowerPoint 2003 |
Winner |
|
| Hitachi T7K250 | w/out NCQ |
8.953 |
2.422 |
1.953 |
2.203 |
2.203 |
|
w/NCQ |
7.984 |
2.375 |
2.609 |
2.766 |
2.109 |
x |
|
| Samsung HD160JJ | w/out NCQ |
8.703 |
2.609 |
2.984 |
3.031 |
2.116 |
|
w/NCQ |
8.601 |
2.554 |
2.887 |
3.115 |
2.245 |
||
| Western Digital WD1600JS | N/A |
8.938 |
2.469 |
2.562 |
2.484 |
2.438 |
|
Hitachi's T7K250 came out as the winner of this round. Photoshop CS usually takes about 8-9 seconds, on average, to load its DLL's and plugins. With NCQ turned on, Photoshop CS finished these tasks 1 second quicker. This 1 second may not seem like such a big deal when it comes to loading applications, but when multitasking scenarious come into play NCQ may shave off a great deal of time.
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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.