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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)

One major difference between the WB99 and HDTach benchmarks is that HDTach measures across the entire platter from the outer to the innermost tracks and, further, that it is very sensitive to any data already present on the drive. That is, in most cases, a freshly "Low Level"-formatted drive will show a smooth arc of the sustained read / write performance from the outer to the innermost tracks whereas any written LBAs will cause a sharp performance valley. This is especially true after defragmenting the drive. WB99 on the other hand, appears to only measure across the primary partition.

HDTach results for a SATA RAID0 configuration using the onboard Silicon Image controller with a default chunk size of 16K. We tried all different chunk sizes from 2K to 128K with 16K as the default giving the best results. Chunk sizes of 32K and above caused a dramatic drop in overall sustained transfers. Note that the first 20 GB are reported way below their theoretical cumulative performance. Likewise, the burst speed could be higher. There are different possibilities, starting from a bottleneck in the controller to simply misreporting of the transfer rates and all other possibilities in between.

WinBench99 Ver. 2.0 disk inspection test

The same configuration as above measured in WinBench99 2.0 shows an average transfer rate of 88.6 MB/sec across the primary partition (6 GB) which is almost exactly the sum of two single drives at the outermost tracks. This result rather clearly demonstrates that the HDTach results are not accurately reporting RAID-0 performance here. On the other hand, WB99 2.0 had some problems with SATA, too, in that the cyclic redundancy checking (CRC data verification) often caused time-out of the benchmark.

PCMark2002 Disk Test

A commonly (ab)used benchmark is FutureMark's PCMark2002. After looking at the detail results we feel that this benchmark does not qualify for assessing the performance of any drive.

The results show the disk performance of the Barracuda SATA V in a single drive configuration. Quite honestly, the results are nothing short of absurd.

To sum this up, the importance of media or platter speed and their contribution to different benchmarks should be clear at this point. Moreover, everybody should be aware of certain caveats that are in place with different benchmarks meaning that if the results cannot be repeated / confirmed with different applications, they may not be valid. Time to move on to what is really on the plate: Interface performance.

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