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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)

In the past, one of our major criticisms about ZiffDavis or eTesting Labs benchmarks has been that the scores showed more dependence on the disk I/O interface than on CPU performance. On the contrary, we found Bapco Sysmark rather insensitive to HDD performance which makes it a great benchmark for CPU and memory performance but a very poor tool to assess drive performance. ZDLabs ContentCreation Winstone appears to be somewhere in between. By extension, the different iterations of Business Winstone appear very suitable as sanity checks for the other benchmarks we were using.

Business Winstone2002 is clearly dominated by the SATA drives, however, the filter drivers apparently cause a slight performance hit. We observed the same effect in Content Creation Winstone2002 and 2003 but to a smaller degree (0.1 points difference).

File Copy

One issue we have not touched upon yet is what is probably important for anybody doing video editing and similar content creation applications and that is a simple file copy. We used a folder containing the following sub-folders and files:

Total Folder size was 307 MB (322,780,099 Bytes)

The entire folder was copied from one drive to another. After each copy, the folder was deleted from the target drive, the recycle bin was emptied and the system cold rebooted to avoid any impact of resident memory data on the copy process. All numbers shown were manually stopped runtimes in seconds, meaning that there is a fair amount of inaccuracy. We further rounded the numbers to the nearest integer but we feel that, at least within the granularity offered, the benchmarks reflect the performance of the given configuration.

Runtime in seconds for the copy of 307 MB from one physical drive to another. Shorter is better. In all cases where the IBM 120 GXP was the target drive, copy times were between 10 and 11 seconds, which we believe is a consequence of the smaller cache (2MB vs 8 MB in all other drives used). If the 120GXP was used as source (master) with the Barracuda ATA V (slave) on the same channel, we noticed that the overall runtime was still slightly longer than if we used SATA to PATA transfers or else SATA to SATA. This seems somewhat logical since the same cable is used for both reads and writes and since Parallel ATA in its current form does not feature any point-to-point topology, the data have to pass through the controller and back. Since it is a total of 2 x 307 MBytes, the amount of data passsing through the cable is roughly sustained 80 MB/sec. That is without counting any command overhead and explains the slightly longer time to complete the copy process.

If we do the math, we see that 307 MB can be copied in 7 seconds which corresponds to approximately 44 MB/sec copy speed. Copy includes reads and writes and this brings us back to the numbers reported by HDTach for the average write performance across the platter that was in the low to mid twenties whereas what we are seeing here are sustained writes at 44 MB/sec. Keep in mind that these numbers are not a benchmark but a workload with a known file size and transfer time, meaning that there is hardly any possibility for error.

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