Hitachi's SATA-II Drive Tested

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."

Comments

Uuh

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

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.

SATA is just fine for me

[__aaitqo8496]

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.

Re:SATA is just fine for me

[billcopc]

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 ?

The great thing about SATA2

[Xenkar]

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.

Re:The great thing about SATA2

[ThatComputerGuy]

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

Re:Poor review, IMO.

[QuantumRiff]

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!

Re:Poor review, IMO.

[SunFan]

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.

Does the article crash your Firefox?

[Futurepower(R)]

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