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Hitachi's SATA-II Drive Tested

Posted by timothy on from the vroom-vroom-the-middle-of-the-pack dept.

Ghost Rider writes "They didn't make much noise about it, but Hardcoreware.net have what looks to be one of first reviews of a SATA-II drive. They Compared the T7K250 from Hitachi to the latest drives from other manufacturers, including Seagate, Maxtor, and Western Digital's Raptor. They performed the tests on the SATA-II capable PDC20579 controller from Promise. It ended up in the middle of the pack in this review, so I'm not sure how much a difference SATA-II is going to make."

25 comments

  1. bah by usernotfound · · Score: 1

    I would bet most computers in existance dont even use a full speed IDE interface yet, let alone SATA

    --
    You call it excessive, I call it ambitious.
    1. Re:bah by superpulpsicle · · Score: 1

      Dollar for dollar IDE and SATA are the same price literally. Though I am convinced SATA never really dominated. The number of places I see using IDE far outpace SATA.

      Only way SATA II will be successful is performing like top SCSI drives at IDE price.

  2. Uuh by RzUpAnmsCwrds · · Score: 5, Informative

    THERE IS NO SATA II.

    There is a new 3GB/s speed, and there is also NCQ, but there is no "SATA II" specification.

    Read for yourself:

    http://www.sata-io.org/namingguidelines.asp

    As for the new 3GB/s speed and NCQ, Maxtor's DiamondMax 10 and Seagate's 7200.8 both support it.

    1. Re:Uuh by gl4ss · · Score: 1, Redundant

      tsk tsk. the purpose of flashbang review sites like this is not to educate, but to misinform ignorants so that they'll go clickety click buying off shiny pebbles.

      (half jokingly... seriously.. there's shitloads of sites like that one that are low on informed content, high on pictures and very high on just silly myths)

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    2. Re:Uuh by Total_Wimp · · Score: 1

      I don't get it. They tried to do real world performance tests and the newest, "coolest" of the bunch ended up middle of the pack. How does this equate to perpetuating "silly myths" and pushing "shiny pebbles"?

      Though I'm not familiar with that exact site, it's easy to see it's one of the type that try to give people the exact info they actually need: Whether or not the things you do every day are going to show a human-noticable increase in speed if you buy the "shiny pebble".

      I personally think they deserve a little more respect for providing this useful public service, even if they do get some of the terminology wrong.

      TW

    3. Re:Uuh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Uhh

      There IS a SATA-II spec. It calls for 3 things mainly:

      1) NCQ (SATA drives already support this often)
      2) 3 GB/s connection (SATA uses 1.5 GB/s)
      3) Staggered Spinup

      The T7K250 supports all three features, and therefore is a true SATA-II drive.

  3. SATA is just fine for me by __aaitqo8496 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'm happy just not having big clunky wires. Most PATA desvices did away with Master/Slave settings with the introduction of Cable Select. Since ATA devices can never really max out the theoretical bandwith of the cables, speed becomes a moot point. For now, I like the smaller cables and the fact that my hard drives no longer fight with my optical drives for space on limited cables. SATA II be damned, I'm happy with it's vanilla father.

    1. Re:SATA is just fine for me by oddsends · · Score: 1

      An array could max that out.(and whatnot, multiplexed into one cable, ect)

    2. Re:SATA is just fine for me by billcopc · · Score: 2, Interesting

      If you've never maxed out the ATA bus, you need to upgrade that 200mhz PPro. One plain-jane IDE hard drive pushes 60+ MB/sec these days. Plug the slave in, you've got 120 MB/sec sustained coming down a 133 MB line. Throw in the awful ATA overhead and everything slows down to a crawl as your drive has to take two passes at the same cylinder just so your host can keep up.

      If they came up with 800 MB/sec busses I would buy it up in a heartbeat. There's no fun having an IDE-Raid array when the limiting factor is the host controller. At least 300 MB/sec SATA is getting closer, and in my case I have four of those ctlrs on my board so I can get creative and rape my HyperTransport into oblivion :D

      I wish I knew why fast disk interfaces are so hard to make. I know the spindles are the limiting factor for throughput, but if we can build blazing fast northbridges and memory controllers, why can't we do the same with the hard drive ? My previous board actually ran its SATA controller through the PCI bus (stealing precious bandwidth from my sound card). What's wrong with these designers ?

      --
      -Billco, Fnarg.com
  4. The great thing about SATA2 by Xenkar · · Score: 3, Informative

    Over two years ago, I read up on SATA2 interface. The thing I really liked about it is the possibility of SATA2 optical drives. A SATA2 DVD+-RW drive would enable us to ditch PATA connectors completely.

    I can't wait until the computer industry finally implements this stuff. I wanted this technology in 2003 when I built my latest computer. I am disappointed to see the industry moving so slowly.

    1. Re:The great thing about SATA2 by ThatComputerGuy · · Score: 2, Informative

      Dude, where have you been? There's no need for SATA2, Plextor's had these out forever now.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    2. Re:The great thing about SATA2 by name773 · · Score: 1

      i just use pata for optical drives and sata for hard drives, a nice compromise so far as i'm concerned

  5. Poor review, IMO. by SunFan · · Score: 1, Insightful


    The disk busses are all faster than an indivual drive, now, but that didn't stop the authors of the review from hooking up a single drive to do their tests.

    Seriously, folks, the only way your're going to saturate something like a Ultra320 SCSI bus is to use RAID, unless the drives start coming with rediculous cache sizes.

    --
    -- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
    1. Re:Poor review, IMO. by QuantumRiff · · Score: 2, Interesting
      exactly!
      The only way to make this speed be used is to "daisy-chain" the drives. Who cares if it can transmit at 3Gb/s, when they are only speaking about between the controller and the 8MB cache? The only way RAID fills the bus is that when one drive is reading, the others are seeking! that doesn't happen with one drive..

      Besides, if they started adding raid 5 into more SATA controllers, the performance would go through the roof. I would much rather have 3 100GB SATA drives, giving me 200GB of storage, than 1 300GB drive.. Sure it has a 5 year warranty, but thats only for the drive, not the data on it. I don't want to lose all of that data over a stinking $150 part..

      wouldn't it be nice though if drives came with a little DDR ram slot on the bottom? pop in a 512MB ram chip? that would be sweet!

      --

      What are we going to do tonight Brain?
    2. Re:Poor review, IMO. by SunFan · · Score: 3, Insightful

      pop in a 512MB ram chip? that would be sweet!

      Higher-end RAID controllers have RAM on them, so perhaps a "trickle-down" effect could lead to more cache on individual drives. I agree that would be pretty neat, especially on UNIX servers where physical RAM is already used up for other things blocking the filesystem cache.

      --
      -- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
  6. Does the article crash your Firefox? by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 2, Informative


    The referenced article crashes the latest version of Firefox, but not the latest version of Mozilla.

    1. Re:Does the article crash your Firefox? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah mine too (1.0.3). What gives?

    2. Re:Does the article crash your Firefox? by f0rtytw0 · · Score: 0, Troll

      The opposite happened to me. Latest version of mozilla on Win2k crashed. Latest version of Firefox on XP was fine. Odd.

      --
      this is the most important sig ever! In your face 446154!
    3. Re:Does the article crash your Firefox? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      The referenced article crashes the latest version of Firefox, but not the latest version of Mozilla.

      Firefox 1.0.2 works fine on a Mac... albeit slow as hell with all those god damn flash ads. Whoever invented Flash should be banished from the earth.

    4. Re:Does the article crash your Firefox? by LazyBoy · · Score: 1, Troll

      Yeah, 1.0.3 on XP. I can't RTFA!

      --

      If Chaos Theory has taught us anything, it's that we must kill all the butterflies.

    5. Re:Does the article crash your Firefox? by ZorinLynx · · Score: 0, Troll

      KaBOOM!

      Yup, I even submitted a Bug to Bugzilla. I hope they fix this; this is one of those bugs that would cause a user trying Firefox to ARRRGH and go back to MSIE.

      -Z

  7. What is the bug number? by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 0, Troll


    What is the Bugzilla bug number?

  8. Waiting for cheap hotswap by TheLink · · Score: 1

    I'm looking for cheap hotswap for HDDs.

    In theory SATA makes it possible (and should be quite cheap to do).

    Should be able to unmount the drive, cut the power. Wait for spin down. Unlock and remove the drive caddies from the bays.

    Maybe the more expensive stuff would have an autolocking mechanism that prevents you from removing the HDD before the platters have slowed down to safe rpms.

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  9. The replies are trolls? by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 0, Troll


    Notice that someone has marked many of the replies to this as "Troll"!

    1. Re:The replies are trolls? by MikeBabcock · · Score: 1

      These messages are not trolls. They may be off topic but they're definately not trolls.

      If you don't know what troll means, go look it up.

      If you don't know what I'm talking about, click that nice little "x messages below your ..." option so you can read the replies above me.

      --
      - Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)