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
Final Words
With SATA150 units flooding the market and SATA300 slowly making its way into the world we should start seeing reductions in the main bottleneck of a PC. And though it is proven that hard disk drives, atleast the mechanical, magnetic type, will never reach the speeds of quicker, solid state memory, we will continue to see improvements in technology and hopefully be able to loosen the bottleneck as much as possible.
With SATA300 we have seen improvements when it comes to multimedia and content creation. During the SYSMark and Winstone Content Creation benchmarks, we saw these units perform the best out of a long list of SATA150, some with NCQ implemented, as well as a 10,000RPM Raptor and the DiamondMax 10 with a 16MB buffer.
These 2nd generation SATA drives, however, did struggle in other areas, such as game level loading times and real world file system tasks. And Samsung's HD160JJ came in at last place in Business Winstone 2004's Multitasking Performance benchmarks.
So what do we think of Hitachi's T7K250, Samsung's HD160JJ, and Western Digital's WD1600JS? For now, SATA300 does wonders for multimedia and content creation. The higher transfer rates help in audio/video data throughput more than in office productivity applications due to the requirements for large amounts of data to be moved. In time, however, we should see improvements in drivers to help reach the true potentials for the new SATA standard.
If you like to keep up with the standards than the new SATA300 drives are a great addition to the storage arsenal, but for now SATA150 has yet to reach maturity and higher capacity SATA300 drives should be on their way soon enough. Holding out may not be such a bad idea for consumers who value disk space more than higher transfer rates.
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mechBgon - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link
Interestingly, my old Cheetah 15k.3 still spanks my Seagate 7200.8 OMGNCQSATABBQ drive by a factor of about 2:1 on seek-intensive real-world work tasks. People with seek-intensive work to do should still explore the SCSI option if it seems like their I/O is holding up the show.PuravSanghani - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link
All graphs should be fixed now.We did use Hitachi's Feature tool to enable SATA 3.0Gb/sec mode prior to the benchmarks.
Purav
ArcticOC - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link
Was the sata2 mode enabled og the test?! This HAVE to bee done after you buy the drive.. because the deafult speed is to 150MB/secsoftware from hitachi have to be run in order to enable 300mode
http://forum.hardware.no/index.php?act=Attach&...
Viper4185 - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link
No graphs for me either! Something is broken!Souka - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link
That is one ugly review.They should pull it, fix it, then repost
ArcticOC - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link
I really hope the testers to their time setting sataII mode to the Hitachi, This ahve to be done manually by their software called "IBM feature tool", unless u do this, det disk will run at low sata 150 instead of the 300mode.http://forum.hardware.no/index.php?act=Attach&...
The disk comes by deafults w/interface of only 150.. chech taht this important is used under all test.. anything else would be BS if not
GhandiInstinct - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link
My raptor still at reign.SocrPlyr - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link
Graphs on some pages and not on others in IE6.Everything looks great in Firefox
Josh
RMSistight - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link
Still no graphs for some pages! I need to read the game loading times!CrystalBay - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link
Well looks like I'll be keeping my 120GB 7200.7 a little longer. :)