Testbed and Testing Methodology

So, how will we test our SATA hard disk drives? It seems pretty simple at first sight: there are a lot of mainboards with integrated SATA chips from Promise and Silicon Image. However, I wanted to check the performance of SATA HDDs with both: Promise and Silicon Image controllers (so that we could get a better idea of the influence integrated SATA<->ATA translators have), but couldn’t find a mainboard with both controllers onboard.

Besides, it would be absolutely wrong to use different mainboards for the tests like that, not to mention mainboards for different CPUs, because all benchmarks are more or less processor-dependent.

This is exactly the reason why we used one testbed for all our tests with different add-on PCI controller cards.

And what about the hard disk drives? Starting from the beginning of this year we could get hold of some Barracuda Serial ATA V HDDs with 120GB storage capacity and early 3.00 firmware version. At that time we managed to get a sample into our lab and to run some tests, but we didn’t post any results, because they were evidently weird (we will specify the matter below). The performance we managed to squeeze out of that SATA hard drive definitely didn’t correspond to what they were actually capable of, so we decided not to give way to panic. Really, I don’t think it could be a good idea to announce all over the web that the “Serial ATA killer turned out impotent” :)

A little later Barracuda SATA with 3.01 firmware appeared. The results obtained with these drives were completely different from the previous ones, which proved all our suppositions about raw firmware and first samples.

By a lucky chance we got hold of two Seagate Barracuda Serial ATA V HDDs of different storage capacities: ST380023AS and ST3120023AS (80GB and 120GB respectively). And it was really great, because we will be able to compare their performance with that of their ATA analogues.

I was very much exited to have an 80GB drive participating in our review, because this is the most popular and attractive storage capacity from the price-to-capacity point of view. However, if an 80GB ATA HDD were competing with a 120GB SATA HDD, it could be really tough to say, who would win :)

Seagate Barracuda SATA and ATA V HDDs with 80GB storage capacity feature better average seek time than 120GB drives (due to the fact that 80GB hard drives do not use the entire platter capacity). Therefore, if we compared a “fast” 80GB ATA drive with a “normal” 120GB SATA drive, we could have really hard time...

For our comparison we took three Seagate hard disk drives: ST380023A, ST3120023A and ST3120024A. The first two HDDs are the regular barracuda ATA V drives with 2MB cache-buffer, and the third solution deserves mentioning separately. This is Barracuda ATA V but equipped with an 8MB cache buffer. Yes, there are HDDs like that too. And this drive appeared very useful for our test session, because it turned out a kind of a bridge from the regular ATA HDDs to the new SATA ones. As we know, Seagate’s SATA disk drives feature 8MB cache-buffer. That is why when we compare their performance with that of regular ATA drives with smaller cache-buffer, we will not be able to state with certainty what exactly made SATA HDDs faster: larger cache-buffer or faster interface. But now that we have ST3120024A at our disposal we will try to draw “correct” conclusions.

By the way, if you have been reading the passage above attentively enough you can skip the Conclusion section of this article, because I have just given the conclusions away :)

The testbed was configured as follows:

• Intel Pentium III (Coppermine) 600MHz CPU;
• ASUS P3B-F mainboard;
• 2 x 128MB PC100 SDRAM ECC by Hyundai;
• IBM DPTA 372050 HDD;
• Matrox Millennium 4MB graphics card;
• Windows 2000 Professional SP2.

ATA/100 hard disk drives were tested with Promise Ultra100 TX2 controller (BIOS: 2.20.0.14 Drivers: 2.00.29), and SerialATA drives were tested with two controllers: Promise SATA150 TX2 Plus (BIOS: v1.00.0.20 Drivers: 1.0.0.16 ) and SiliconImage SiI CP3112SATA150 (BIOS: 4.1.50 Drivers: 1.0.0.41).