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LOSTCIRCUITS		SHORTCUTS: Top Page, VRM musings At One Glance Bundle, Layout Connectors, BIOS Test Configuration Memory Performananc I/O Performance Winstones Gaming Performance Overclocking Conclusions Your comments? ABit Mainboards Online
ABit BH7    The Legend Lives On
(Review by MS, March 31, 2003)

I/O Performance

We hinted earlier at the fact that the use of the Marvell bridge chip to interface one SATA connector with the ICH4 may not be the greatest idea for the main reason that the use of the SATA connector actually kills the entire secondary IDE channel. Another issue we did not go into yet is the performance of the bridge solution in terms of raw burst transfers. Keep in mind that the UATA 100 interface natively can only digest 100 MB/sec which means that putting a high spee interface in front of it can have all kinds of adverse effects, starting from a simple backlog to dropped packets and retry that effectively could cut the performance in half or less.

HDTach

It is certainly not the latest and greatest HDD benchmark but it still has some merits, especially for single drive configurations. In this case, it turned out that the SATA interface is running quite a bit more slowly than the parallel interface which was somewhat along the lines of what we thought might happen.

      

Left: SATA performance shows a limit in burst reads to about 60 MB/sec whereas the Parallel ATA version of the same drive gets up to 87 MB/sec which is about standard for any UATA100 interface. Note the typical, extremely low CPU utilization of the SATA drive.

SiSoft Sandra 2003 FileSystem

             

Left: PATA Drive, first partition (outer tracks), center: same drive, last partition (inner tracks), right: SATA drive outer tracks. Note that the burst transfer rate (buffered reads and writes do not change as one goes from the outer to the inner tracks. However, on the SATA drive, the burst performance is the same as shown by HDTach. Click thumbnails for larger images.

Leaving the SATA issues aside, it is time to move on to application performance.

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