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| Seagate Barracuda SATA-V Kudos to Cudas |
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| (Review by MS, February 4) | ||
System Disclosure
nForce2 Platform
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Granite Bay Platform
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Software
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* The nVidia 2.03 drivers feature the new SW IDE drivers 5.10.2600.307 that increase performance of IDE devices by up to 40% but are also plagued by several compatibility issues. For example, IDE drives show up as SCSI drives and CD burners do not work on these drivers. We use these drivers as a reference for how much performance can theoretically be achieved with parallel ATA drives but we also give the performance using the standard IDE drivers where appliccable since the SW drivers cannot be used in all system configurations.
** The detailed specifications of each drive are posted on the manufacturer's websites. All drives were partitioned into a 3 GB primary partition and an extended partition with a 1.5 GB logical drive for the exclusive use as a swapfile. The remaining disk space was partitioned into logical drives of approximately 30 GB and formatted using the FAT32 file system.
HDTach
The most commonly used benchmark measuring the internal speed of HDDs is TCDLab's HDTach "sustained transfer rate". Identical data can be obtained from WinBench99 2.0 "Drive inspection test". Data from both benchmarks are almost indistinguishable from each other except that we found results obtained with WB99 more reproducible and less susceptible to jitter.
HDTach results for the Parallel ATA version of the Barracuda V. Note that the drive used was a 120 GB specimen as opposed to the 80 GB drives used for the SATA interface (see below). The 80 GB version uses three heads on 2 platters, whereas the 120GB version uses four heads with two platters. This translates into what is commonly referred to as shortened platters for the 80 GB version and even though the difference is minimal (we are talking about 26.67 vs. 30 GB/platter and head), it will affect the innermost tracks and, consequently, the average read speed across the platter.
HDTach results for the Serial ATA version of the Barracuda V. In this case, the drive had a capacity of 80 GB, using three heads on 2 platters resulting in 26.67 GB / head. As a result , the innermost tracks, which are the slowest, are not used which increases the average read performance. Writes are apparently not affected in the same manner, at least according to the results shown here. On the other hand, it appears as if HDTach bypasses the write cache since the write performance of all drives is only about 1/2 of what it should be. We will return to this issue towards the end of this review again.
HDTach results for the IBM 120 GXP (123 GB total capacity) for comparison. Both sustained read and writes are higher as is the burst speed while the random access time is lower. For the record, this particular screenshot was obtained on a different system using the Maxtor (Promise PDC20269) ATA133 PCI controller card. The drive characteristics are the same (except for the CPU usage that is driver dependent).
next page: => HDTach vs. WinBench 99 2.0 vs PCMark2002 =>
