Eureka!

Well, if you were wondering about the advantages of SATA-II over regular IDE ATA or Ultra ADA harddrives, you’re not alone. I built myself a new computer from scratch this past week, and part of is was moving to SATA technology for performance reasons. Now that I have this new system, and went through the effort and money to get some more performance, I want to know if it really was worth it. Are they better?

These following tests are comparisons between different SATA-II RAID-0 arrays and my old Ultra-ATA 100 harddrive. I never invested in SATA harddrives, because I felt their performance was only marginally better than IDE ATA drives and that the little gains weren’t worth the investment. However, now with SATA-II 300 (triple the speed of Ultra ATA 100), I felt this was definately worth a shot. And to gain even more performance, I set up 3 identical SATA-II drives in a striped raid configuration for maximum performance.

I did not test performance differences between the various raid setups (RAID-0, RAID-1, RAID-0+1, RAID-5). My tool of choice for benchmarking my harddrives was to use HD Tach due to its easy of use, clear graphical reporting, and small file size. Additionaly I purchased some aftermarket SATA-II data cables that can deal with a throughput of SATA-II 3Gb/s. I will compare these with the standard SATA cables that came with the Motherboard (DFI LanParty nF4 SLI-DR). I would also like to note that the Hitachi drives come stock at SATA 150. To ‘unlock’ the SATA 300 capability you must download the Hitachi Feature Tool (should it not come with your drive).

Let’s get started:

Benchmark A: Seagate Barracuda ST3200822A
Purpose: To get a baseline to compare SATA-II performance against.
Specs: 200GB, 7200 RPM, 8MB Cache, IDE Ultra ATA100
Results: Not very impressive, but I suspect the performance of this drive reflects drive performance of the average Joe’s computer. Bottom line is that it’s top data throughput was very close to the labeled 100 MB/sec: it closed out at 95.6MB/sec.

Benchmark B: Hitachi Deskstar HDT722516DLA380
Purpose: To determine the stock performance of a SATA-II 300 drive.
Specs: 160 GB, 7200 RPM, 8MB Cache, SATA-II 300 (also referred to as 3Gb/sec*)
Results: The results are undoubtedly higher than the Seagate drive. This drive clocked in at 223.6MB/sec. While nowhere near the theoretical throughput of 300MB/sec, it performs more than twice as good as the Seagate.

Benchmark C: Hitachi Deskstar HDT722516DLA380 w/Aftermarket Data Cable
Purpose: To determine if aftermarket data cables are necessary for 3Gb/s drives (all SATA data cables can perform at least at 1.5Gb/s.
Specs: 160 GB, 7200 RPM, 8MB Cache, SATA-II 300 (also referred to as 3Gb/sec*)
Results: These results had me a bit surprised: 223.7MB/sec. I expected the greater quality of the aftermarket cables to outperform the stock MoBo SATA cables. They don’t seem to. I heard on various forums that data cables can be and often are a bottleneck for the 3Gb/s drives, but I have to take from this that DFI really had their act together when they put this motherboard and its accessories together.

Benchmark D: 3x Hitachi Deskstar HDT722516DLA380 RAID-0 Single Partition
Purpose: To compare a RAID-0 setup to a standalone drive and see if RAID-0 really has marked performance gain.
Specs: 3 identical drives, 160 GB, 7200 RPM, 8MB Cache, SATA-II 300 (also referred to as 3Gb/sec*)
Results: RAID rocks! It makes SATA-II standalone look like an old whimp: 340MB/s. I’m sold.

Benchmark E: 3x Hitachi Deskstar HDT722516DLA380 RAID-0 3 Partitions
Purpose: I don’t want to use a single 480GB drive for all my stuff, so this test is to determine if there is any performance loss using partitions.
Specs: 3 identical drives, 160 GB, 7200 RPM, 8MB Cache, SATA-II 300 (also referred to as 3Gb/sec*)
Results: The difference to the previous test is so small, that I wouldn’t even consider it a factor: using partitions I still got a throughput of 338MB/s on my RAID-0.

Conlusion: If you want to get the most out ouf your drive performance without going to SCSI and spending tons of money on controllers and drives, get SATA-II 300s. I couldn’t find them in stored, but people are selling them on Ebay for cheaper than the standard IDE drives! Even if you’re not going for a performance upgrade you might want to consider them if your motherboard supports SATA-II 300. Total cost for my upgrade:
3 Hitachi drives on Ebay: $250
1 DFI LanParty nF4 SLI-DR: $190
Total Cost: $440
I definately think it was worth it, since I expect my new setup to last me between 3 and 5 years without needing an upgrade.

Please: let me know your SATA experiences. Are you satisfied, or are yours not performing up to par?

* Please note that the advertised 3Gb/sec (giga-bit) is not 3GB/sec (giga-byte). The actual transfer rate of 3Gb/s is 0.375GB/sec, or 375MB/sec.