Navigate: Advice Beginners BIOS Guide CPUs Links Mainboards Memory Network Storage Video/Sound Cards Contact Forum SiteMap Sponsors WebNews Home	.	.
Prices: CPU Intel P4 2.4C-800 P4 2.6C-800 P4 2.8C-800 P4 3.0-800 P4 3.2-800 AMD AthlonXP XP 1700+ XP 2000+ XP 2400+ XP 2500+ XP 2700+ XP 3000+ XP 3200+ Athlon64 Athlon64 3200+ Athlon64 FX-51 Opteron Opteron 240 Opteron 242 Opteron 244 Opteron 246 Memory Corsair Crucial Kingston Mushkin OCZ Search Prices:

In any of today's high-end desktop computers, the I/O interface or more specifically the hard disk drive is the predominant bottleneck. Serial ATA promises some alleviation of the bottleneck by elimiating the master - slave arbitration scheme as well as the command overhead and polling latencies associated with deferred execution of parallel commands. In other words, since these improvements are done on the controller / interface level, it is very conceivable that just adding a bridge connector like ABit's Serillel adapter will yield a disproportionate performance increase. Needless to say that the improvements will only be overt in workloads that are not limited by the internal drive performance, which is dependent on platter data density and rotational speed. In other words, don't expect HDTach to show any differences in sequential read / writes.

Where differences will show up are workloads that are depending on small chunks of data in multiple transactions and the prime benchmark for this scenario is oh-so-outdated Winbench99. We took two Seagate Barracuda V to compare the Parallel ATA with the Native Serial ATA drive and the Parallel drive using the Serillel adapter. For the record, the SATA drive is an 80GB drive with three heads whereas the PATA drive is the 120 GB version featuring four heads which causes slightly different performance characteristics, nonetheless, the results simply blew us away. We used the SiliconImage 10027 driver revision that provide a major improvement over the 10022 or older SiI drivers.

Red: Barracuda ATA-V, turquois: Same drive using Serillel adapter, grey: Barracuda SATA-V. The FrontPage98 results are scaled 1:10 for better resolution of the other benchmarks.

It is pretty obvious that the results vary from one application to the other but that we already knew. What we did not know is that the Serillel adapter by itself more than doubles the performance in the Business DiskMark and AVS Express and shows similar improvements in some of the other individual sub-benchmarks. Very impressive to say the least. Keep in mind that the correct drivers are a key feature here.

next page:    => WinStones =>