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LOSTCIRCUITS		SHORTCUTS: Accepting a Narrow Bus Internal vs. Interface Performance HDTach: ATA vs. SATA HDTach vs. WinBench99 vs. PCMark Parallel ATA Command Overhead Streamlined SATA FIS, Prelude to Performance WinBench99 Overview Winbench99 Details Business Winstone2002, File Copy Conclusions Cheetahs and Cudas on the web Comments?
Seagate Barracuda SATA-V     Kudos to Cudas
(Review by MS, February 4)

All File copy results shown on the last page were obtained with either the nVidia SW IDE drivers or else with the Silicon Image base drivers. When we used the Filter drivers and copied from one SATA drive to any other Parallel ATA or SATA drive, run times increased from 7 seconds to roughly 17 seconds. Increasing system memory to 1GB dropped the copy time back to 13 sec. Interestingly, only reads were affected by the SI Filter drivers. To be fair, though, we have to consider that these filter drivers are the first beta version and only give an idea of what is going to be possible with more mature driver software. Maybe we are a bit optimistic but it is possible that we will see driver updates that will bring us the best of the two worlds meaning the top scores obtained with either base or filter drivers. In any event, we hear that a fix is on the way already.

On a side note, using the original nVidia IDE drivers, the copy time from the IBM 120GXP to the parallel Barracuda ATA V increased to 10 seconds. The other way around, that is with the 120GXP as target, the copy time did not increase over the original 10 sec. At first, this appears counterintuitive but it does make sense in that the two bottlenecks, that is, the write cache and the parallel bus now match each other but do not add on top of each other.

Conclusion

After about two weeks worth of benchmarking Serial and Parallel ATA drives in any possible hard and software configuration thinkable, battling benchmarks and installing / uninstalling drivers and service packs not to mention the time spent on restoring a virgin state of the drives using zero-fills, we have a variety of results and conclusion. Lets's go step by step through them.

• SATA controller drivers are still somewhat immature. This is not too surprising, after all, and just as one example, it took VIA technologies since 1998 to get their IDE controllers to be competitive. In light of that, Silicon Image has done a fantastic job getting things to where they are already. We were talking to their engineering team throughout the course of data acquisition for this review and some of the issues only now emerged and are in the process of being taken care of.
  

  Special thanks fo Seagate for providing the drives

• There is a dire need for new and adequate benchmarks, at this point, there is nothing out there that even remotely matches the performance of the current generation of drive. HDTach and WinBench99 drive inspection test give similar results in sustained reads but that is where the similarities end. WB99 reports average acess times that are similar or below those shown by the manufacturers and consistent to the second decimal, HDTach results are way above those and show a high degree of variability from one run to the next. The low access times and better precision in WinBench99 may also be a result of its self-confinement to the primary partition.
• Both WB99 drive inspection test and HDTach are essentially measuring internal drive performance and are totally inadequate for assessing interface performance except for the burst speed. Therefore, the same drives will, by definition, show the same performance regardless of whether they come in parallel or serial flavor.
• WB99 Business and High-end Disk WinMark need at least to be updated to include the lastest versions of programs used. Results like the ones we got with Frontpage98 show the age of the benchmark and it should not be too hard to recompile the software appropriately.
• PCMark2002 appears completely unsuitable for measuring drive performance.
• There are other benchmarks like I/OMeter that can be used to measure for example the number of total I/O transactions but where is the relevance for real world performance.
• Standard applications like Business Winstone2002 and our home-made file copy across drives showed that there is a real world benefit of Serial ATA even though, in the case of Business Winstone, the benefit is buried in the system performance overhead.

The Verdict

Even with the external controller chip on the mainboard, that is, without integration of the SATA controller into the south Bridge, Serial ATA appears to take off in terms of performance which in some instances resulted in 338 % of the baseline score. Some of these enhancements, particularly in business or data base applications dealing with transfer of small files can be attributed to the streamlined command - or "frame information" structure and the associated reduction of latencies, others are driver issues. Still, a doubling of the performance of the best Parallel ATA scores sends a rather strong message.

Most current drives do not yet reach the specified interface speed of 1.5Gbit/sec, however, a large portion of this can also be attributed to either the controller or else the bus bottleneck further downstream as, e.g. the PCI bus. Unfortunately, at the time of testing, we have not been able to get our hands on a PCI-X controller card to really challenge the performance of SATA drives in RAID 0 configuration.

Overall, there is no turning back to parallel drives. Bridge adapters are already available, even though it remains to be determined whether the current generation of adapter will work with conventional, existing optical storage media such as CD and DVDROM. Suffice it to say that the next generation of optical drive using a serial interface is already around the corner, we already held them in our hands, so we know.

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