Conclusion

Since our review was supposed to answer two questions: “Are SerialATA hard disk drives faster than their ATA predecessors?” and “Which SerialATA controller provides the best performance today?” we will draw our conclusions in two parts as well.

The first acquaintance with SerialATA interface and the products supporting it didn’t prepare any unpleasant surprises for us. All hardware units worked very stable and fast. So, we are sure that waiting for the first SerialATA products for such a long time was not in vain: the customers will definitely get not beta-versions of the HDDs and controller cards but very thoroughly tested and debugged solutions (from what we hear Seagate Barracuda SATA V HDD with 3.01 firmware are already available in retail).

And the absence of problems is very important when the new generation comes. If some problems arise when the new product is just coming into the market, then the conservative users may get too discouraged to buy it. And if there is no demand, then the company will hardly dare push the supply (the only exception is Intel, because this company is almost a monopolist today).

Congratulations to Seagate Company, which appeared the first one to enter this market and really succeeded with their SerialATA products. Seagate SATA drives proved faster than their predecessors and their production cost will hardly be much higher. Of course, we understand that these are the first drives in this market niche and they are also a kind of transitional product. But despite this fact, we have clearly seen that the contemporary hard disk drives really do need a faster bus. Not to mention the next generation HDDs with native command queuing support and other features provided by SerialATA.

The SerialATA controllers are also worth talking about. We introduced to you two SATA controllers in this review, which are most likely to become very widely spread in the nearest future. The controller manufacturers are very well-known to us: they are Promise Technology and SiliconImage. The products reviewed today have their highs and lows, but in general they both deserve your attention.

SiliconImage controller proved quite fast in all tests, but its trump appeared “desktop” applications. We would also like to stress stably high performance in all copy tests.

Promise controller on the contrary didn’t manage to conceal its server origin. This is probably the reason why there was no optimization for Winbench tests. However, a few very interesting technologies implemented in it and very remarkable drivers helped Promise SATA 150 TX2 Plus to perform really great, and when some optimization didn’t work, another one immediately came to rescue. The only thing that upsets me about testing Promise controller is the fact that my testbed seems to have become too outdated for contemporary HDDs and controllers. Time to upgrade :)

And in conclusion I have to say that my concerns about Promise SATA 150 TX2 Plus being slower because of a Marvel SATA<->ATA converter didn’t prove justified. The results showed that the integrated converter didn’t affect the average access time as well as the overall controller performance in any benchmark.

And a few words about some global matters. The first products have already appeared. It means that very soon the SerialATA products will start streaming down like from a horn of plenty. Is it good? Well, and is there anything bad about it? We haven’t discovered any drawbacks of SATA drives and they proved not any harder top use than the regular ATA HDDs. The price of the new SATA products is certainly a little higher now, but as the new products will be coming out it will definitely go down to an acceptable level. Therefore, I strongly recommend all of you who are about to assemble a new PC, do not make a mistake when choosing the interface.

Special Thanks

Bis dat, qui cito dat
  "those who give quickly, give twice as much"

We would like to sincerely thank Seagate Company for the opportunity to test Seagate Barracuda SATA V, Promise Technology Company for SATA 150 TX2 Plus and SATA 150 TX4 controllers, and SiliconImage Company for Sil CP3112SATA150 controller.