WinBench99 2.0

Now let’s compare the hard disk drives with the good old WinBench99 test set:

As usual, we will take a closer look at two major subtests: Business Disk WinMark and High-End Disk WinMark.

The first thing I would like to draw your attention to is the performance of 120GB drives in Business Disk WinMark. The large cache-buffer is evidently an advantage here. Even with ATA100 interface Seagate Barracuda ATA V with 8MB cache-buffer appeared 17% faster than the drive with smaller cache. But the SATA drive turned out even faster than that! If we compare the performance of 120GB drives in High-End Disk WinMark, we will see that the advantage of an ATA drive with 8MB cache-buffer over the same drive with a 2MB cache-buffer is not very big, while the SATA model is far ahead of both of them.

In the 80GB group the situation is very similar: SATA hard disk drives are stably ahead of ATA solutions in both tests. Note that the SATA drive with Promise SATA 150 TX2 Plus controller in WB mode proved faster in Business Disk WinMark, while in High-End Disk WinMark its performance appeared lower than that of a SATA drive with Promise SATA 150 TX2 Plus (WT) controller.

Now let’s check the performance in NTFS file system:

Well, the changes are not that drastic, but they are noticeable :)

First of all, there is hardly any advantage left of the 120GB HDD with 8MB cache-buffer over the drive with 2MB cache-buffer in High-End Disk WinMark. It is even smaller than the measuring error.

Secondly, the performance of SATA HDD with Promise SATA 150 TX2 Plus (WT) controller in High-End Disk WinMark test appeared lower than incase the controller worked in WB mode. It is really strange, because in FAT32 the situation was completely the opposite.

WinBench99 tests let us conclude that SATA hard disk drives demonstrated a really impressive performance boost provided not only by large 8MB cache-buffer. At the same time we wouldn’t claim that the “faster” interface was the only one to praise for the performance improvement: we shouldn’t forget about the influence of the firmware versions.

But anyway, we cannot deny it: SATA HDDs work faster than their ATA predecessors.