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SATA II to the Power of 3.0Gb/sec: Three Drives Reviewed
First Page:
Introduction
Our overview of the SATA II specification a few days ago provided our readers with some insight on what SATA II was really about. In short, SATA II provides updates to the SATA 1.0 specifications including new features and a possible increase in transfer rates from 1.5Gb/sec to 3.0Gb/sec if drive manufacturers decide to implement these features in their products. The new transfer rates depend on what combination of hardware is used to build a drive such as the port multiplier, port selector, cables, and connectors used in a storage system.
The first drives capable of 3.0Gb/sec transfer rates came to our attention a while back but we wanted to see a few other manufacturers show us their offerings before we dug deeper into the supposed higher speed drives. Hitachi was the first to market the SATAII 3.0Gb/sec drive with Samsung and Western Digital following. Samsung was nice enough to send us a test sample to work with and we picked up a Hitachi and Western Digital model in time.
All drives are, of course, SATA II units capable of 3.0Gb/s. The Samsung and Hitachi drives feature Native Command Queuing while Western Digital has decided to leave the feature out. The SATA II standard does not require any of these features but it is always nice to have them in any newly released drive. Our look at Seagate's Barracudas proved that NCQ has no great effect on regular day-to-day tasks so we are not expecting much from the feature this time around. Let's take a look at our testing methods...
Last Page:
Conclusion
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.
[RANK="www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2454"]Read the Full Review here[/RANK]
First Page:
Introduction
Our overview of the SATA II specification a few days ago provided our readers with some insight on what SATA II was really about. In short, SATA II provides updates to the SATA 1.0 specifications including new features and a possible increase in transfer rates from 1.5Gb/sec to 3.0Gb/sec if drive manufacturers decide to implement these features in their products. The new transfer rates depend on what combination of hardware is used to build a drive such as the port multiplier, port selector, cables, and connectors used in a storage system.
The first drives capable of 3.0Gb/sec transfer rates came to our attention a while back but we wanted to see a few other manufacturers show us their offerings before we dug deeper into the supposed higher speed drives. Hitachi was the first to market the SATAII 3.0Gb/sec drive with Samsung and Western Digital following. Samsung was nice enough to send us a test sample to work with and we picked up a Hitachi and Western Digital model in time.
All drives are, of course, SATA II units capable of 3.0Gb/s. The Samsung and Hitachi drives feature Native Command Queuing while Western Digital has decided to leave the feature out. The SATA II standard does not require any of these features but it is always nice to have them in any newly released drive. Our look at Seagate's Barracudas proved that NCQ has no great effect on regular day-to-day tasks so we are not expecting much from the feature this time around. Let's take a look at our testing methods...
Last Page:
Conclusion
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.
[RANK="www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2454"]Read the Full Review here[/RANK]