SATA II to the Power of 3.0Gb/sec: Three Drives Reviewed

Overall System Performance - Winstone 2004

Business Winstone 2004

• Microsoft Access 2002
• Microsoft Excel 2002
• Microsoft FrontPage 2002
• Microsoft Outlook 2002
• Microsoft PowerPoint 2002
• Microsoft Project 2002
• Microsoft Word 2002
• Norton AntiVirus Professional Edition 2003
• WinZip 8.1

The actual Business Winstone 2004 benchmark gives Samsung the credit by giving the HD160JJ 26.7 and 27.1 points with and without NCQ enabled, respectively. Western Digital comes in at last here and it seems that NCQ has no effect on business application performance.

MCC Winstone 2004

• Adobe® Photoshop® 7.0.1
• Adobe® Premiere® 6.50
• Macromedia® Director MX 9.0
• Macromedia® Dreamweaver MX 6.1
• Microsoft® Windows MediaTM Encoder 9 Version 9.00.00.2980
• NewTek's LightWave® 3D 7.5b
• SteinbergTM WaveLabTM 4.0f

Here we go! It looks as though SATA300 performance kicks in during the Content Creation benchmarks. All of our test drives shot to the top of the list between 36.1-36.6 points with Western Digital's WD1600JS coming in at first. NCQ still had no visible effect on Hitachi's and Samsungs drives.