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

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.