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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)

Currently the singlemost powerful platform for AMD processors is the nForce2 platform. Aside from the independent dual memory controllers, the MCP-T offers what is currently probably the most powerful and efficient IDE controller, featuring support for UATA 133 as a side dish. It may appear somewhat unfair to pit the newcomer Serial ATA against such a formidable opponent but that is exactly what is needed to establish some of the performance rankings. Suffice it to say that we could have used any other chipset as well but the nForce2 chipset with its different IDE driver sets provides an excellent basis for performance comparison across what is possible and what is reasonable in parallel ATA.

Winbench99 Business Disk Winmark99

We already showed the impact of the Silicon Image Filter drivers on Winbench99 Diskmark performance on the last page. We also mentioned earlier that the Intel Application Accelerator might wash out some of the performance differences by using prefetching mechanisms/algorithms. One way around this problem would have been to avoid loading the IAA optimizations, however, in some ways, this would have been similar to driving a car on the spare tire.

Just when we thought we'd seen it all: Installing the Filter drivers results in more than doubling of the SATA performance. These numbers are real. Please also note the scores achieved with the Maxtor D740X and the IBM 120 GXP drives that, looked at in isolation would stomp anything else out there, courtesy of the latest nForce drivers released only last week. For the record, with the new SW IDE drivers as part of the 2.03 chipset driver package, we saw up to 40% performance increase over the standard drivers. This, however, only underscores the stellar scores achieved with the SATA drive(s) in either single or RAID 0 configuration. Note how much the new IDE drivers profit from the larger cache of the parallel Barracuda ATA V.

SIBase, SIFilt: Single Barracuda SATA V drive using either base drivers alone or upgraded to the latest filter drivers; S-RAID: SATA RAID 0 with either Base or Filter drivers. The * denotes the use of the original nVidia IDE drivers (6.1.2600.00, turquoise columns) that deliver almost identical perfornance as the Microsoft drivers, only at lower CPU usage.

Winbench99 High-End Disk Winmark99

As mentioned earlier, business applications running from the cache will be the prime beneficiaries of the SATA protocol as well as of the larger (8MB) cache whereas the differences in content creation applications involving the movement of large files would erode, courtesy of the limitations in internal performance.

In the High-End domain, raw bandwidth is what counts most, therefore, it is no surprise that the RAID 0 configurations take the lead. Still, the single Barracuda SATA V maintains a solid lead over every other drive in the competition as long as the Filter drivers are used.

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