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  • Justin Case - Saturday, March 18, 2006 - link

    Does anyone really believe Seagate 7200.8 drives can sustain 70 MB/s in the inner sectors? I have three of those and they struggle to reach 38 MB/s. Anyone with a clue about hard drives would have spotted a screw-up in the benchmarks (and this isn't the only one). Here is the full WinBench99 graph for a Seagate 7200.8:

    http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200504/20050...">http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200504/20050...

    Anandtech is even less credible than Tom's Hardware, these days. What a joke. I hope Anand got a big fat check from Seagate for publishing this "review"...
  • PuravSanghani - Tuesday, June 28, 2005 - link

    #24 & 25: Our apologies for such a delayed reply. The reason we used the older v6.39 driver is that it is the latest driver Giga-Byte has released on its website.

    Though Nvidia may have implemented newer features in the v6.54 release, the driver package the motherboard manufacturer has on their website is usually tested for their particular boards.

    We will definitely look into the newer versions in the future to see if they provide any useful updates that apply to our review topic and use them accordingly.
  • PuravSanghani - Tuesday, June 28, 2005 - link

    #44: By "% Difference" we mean the difference between the time it takes to zip the file as a task by itself and the time it takes to zip a file while Outlook is importing 400MB of emails into its Inbox.

    #45: They are there.

    #48: The transfer rates are actually measured in MBytes/sec. But yes, the results are correct and the benchmarks have been run twice to confirm these numbers. Also, many of our readers have pointed out that the 3.0Gbp/sec transfer rates, or transfer rates higher than those we have encountered, are mainly achieved when the drives are setup in RAID arrays.

    #49: Actually, our results are of the drive itself in a silent room with no PC fan or other hardware running. We turn off all other system fans and take sound readings 1" away from the side of each drive during its startup phase as well as during normal operation, specifically during Windows startup.

    We will be sure to specify this in future reviews.

    Sorry for the bulky reply, but I hope it helps.

    Purav
  • yacoub - Tuesday, June 28, 2005 - link

    #45 - Well, Anandtech's noise measurement is clearly pretty pointless if they all come out so close together. That generally means they aren't testing the drive itself for its noise output, but then entire case with whatever other noisy components are in there. Guess we'll have to wait for SilentPCReview to test the new drives to find out how quiet they are for those who -aren't- running 50decibel systems. =P
  • tinyabs - Tuesday, June 28, 2005 - link

    Why does new drives have 60-70Mb of Begin transfer rate? Is that correct?
  • BornStar18 - Tuesday, June 28, 2005 - link

    LX-

    Did you miss page 13?
  • Zak - Monday, June 27, 2005 - link

    Why using megabits per second in hard disk review if most people are used to megabytes? It's a bit confusing.

    -Z
  • LX - Monday, June 27, 2005 - link

    Incomplete review.

    What about noise?
    What about temperature?
  • ElFenix - Monday, June 27, 2005 - link

    on page 12, is it just how i'm reading these or does it indicate that the % done is much better under multitasked than when only running the zip?
  • yacoub - Monday, June 27, 2005 - link

    Wow, that review left me somewhat uncertain.

    While reading it I started out liking the Hitachi best, but then around a third of the way through it started to suck, but then again near the end it looked good.

    The Raptor still looked like the champ for the first third of the review, but then the 400GB Barracuda shined for a few tests (probably the important ones, surprisingly) such as Sustained Transfer Rate (where it blew away everything else though the 300GB DiamondMax 16MB came close) and Real World File System Tasks with the 300 1MB files, etc.

    When it comes to thermals they all suck except for the DiamondMax drives, imho, and as far as acoustics go, forget it (get a drive suspension rig and isolation enclosure or get laptop HDs if you're really picky about noise).
  • 100proof - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    Above post was for Kristopher.. :D
  • 100proof - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    For all intents and purposes the Sata II designation from my original post was used just for familiarity.. This is how these current drives are advertised and sold, but I'm aware of the name change and did happen to catch the Sata-IO article here on AT. :) Thanks for looking out though :)
  • greekfragma - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    I am still waiting for an answer why they didnt install 6.54 chipset drivers packet instead of 6.39 that is last year's............

    hilarious the ending of the article......i post it once more to be more understood with the things i wrote above.

    "In time, however, we should see improvements in drivers to help reach the true potentials for the new SATA standard."

    plz answer
  • sprockkets - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    Nvm, reading their tech docs state it is 1.5gbits per a second, but figure 80% throughput due to its 8b10b encoding and then divide by 8 for the 150MB xfer rate, so it would assume then the new rate is 300MB from a total of 3.0gb per second.

    It has already been proven NCQ does nothing for the desktop at storagereview.com and decreases performance for non server use. Having twice the bandwidth doesn't help whnen these drives put out a constant 40-70MB anyhow, and burst maybe around over a hundred.
  • sprockkets - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    I don't understand why they say 3.0Gb when the old spec was 150MB a second, shouldn't that mean GB instead of Gb? Doesn't the B being capital mean it should be bytes and not the G?
  • Mariosalice - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    The latest WidowsXP64 Nvidia drivers for AMD are 6.39 and for Windows XP32 are 6.53
  • Mariosalice - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    I would appreciate a SATA II hard disk (raid0 bootable vs single drive vs SATA I)review based on a testbed with dual core Athlon 64, on an nforce4 mobo with windows XP 64 and 6.53 drivers. This is the near future I think.
    As for the tests, just use what you would to compare single vs dual core processors.
    One suggestion. Avast supports 64 bit Windows and you get it for free so you may use it for your tests. Then we may talk how better or not is SATA II compared to SATA I.
  • Olaf van der Spek - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    #34
    > You'd be looking at a minimum of four drives in a striped-array to reach those sort of speeds

    Eh, you do know that SATA is point to point by default and that the interface only becomes a bottleneck if port multipliers are being used, do you?
  • PrinceGaz - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    It should be pretty obvious to all regular AT readers that the increased transfer rate of SATA II will have a negligible effect except with striped or other RAID arrays that can offer over about 150MB/s sustained transfer-rate. You'd be looking at a minimum of four drives in a striped-array to reach those sort of speeds, which is not something most people have. All SATA II does with these drives in any normal situation is allow them to transfer data to and from their 8MB cache a bit quicker, which isn't going to make any noticeable real-world difference.

    I don't have an nVidia chipset so your using the v6.39 chipset drivers didn't mean anything to me, but if they are as old as some here have said, it does throw a big question-mark over whether the results would be the same with the latest drivers.

    As for the benefits of NCQ and the apparent disadvantages of it in many of the tests in this report, all I'll say is Pentium D and Athlon 64 X2. All the disk-intensive multi-tasking benchmarks with those showed major gains with NCQ enabled drives, because the processor was requesting totally seperate data simultaneously while running two threads, whereas a single-core CPU is only running a single task at once and therefore is never truly multi-tasking.

    Good review though, all the graphs worked for me. I'm happy with my Maxtor drives which (touch wood) have served me flawlessly for many years and I've never had a single failure. It's tempting fate saying that but I recently backed everything important up so a drive throwing in the towel wouldn't be a total nightmare.

    I still maintain the major advantage of SATA (I or II) is the smaller cables. I look forward to building my next box where the only ribbon cables have to be routed up to the optical drives.
  • KristopherKubicki - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    100proof: Have you read http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=24...

    SATAII is a myth....

    Kristopher
  • fbottone - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    Hows about adding a Maxtor SATAII (like Maxline III 300GB) drive to the mix? The SATA-I maxtors do pretty well in certain tests but I'd like to see them compared with the three very good drives already there.
  • BornStar18 - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    I'm confused by your conclusion on page 5 regarding Office Productivity. Your written statement doesn't support what I'm looking at in the graph. Does the text not refer to graph?
  • 100proof - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    Would it be possible to get an update to this review showcasing some of the real benefits of SATA II?

    It seems pointless to test these drives individually as it's fairly obvious drives set at the 7200rpm speed will not improve much for indivdual performance.. Raid Arrays are necessary to guage how much of a performance boost the added bw of SATA300 factors into results. It would also be nice to see comparisons of these new SATA II drives in raid set against similar setups of SATA 150/ATA raid arrays. This might be asking too much though...
  • olly - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    When you select "Print this article", page 3 onwards the font is too big.
  • Svenna - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    There is actually no good SATA NCQ conrollers around for the for the amd platform, yet. IMO only the new AHCI controller would be worth testing ncq on :(
  • Aenslead - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    bah... what a fiasco.
  • Googer - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    I think this says it all, Raptors are almost extinct. They need to be updated or they will die.

    The performance they show is poor when compaired to the latest 7200 drives.
  • greekfragma - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    couldnt agree more with zax7480.

    gyuz can u tell us what was wrong with nvidia driver package 6.54 and u tested with a driver that was publiced one year ago ?

    plus i like your comment at final words of the article
    '' In time, however, we should see improvements in drivers to help reach the true potentials for the new SATA standard.''

    thumbs down for this review
  • jax7480 - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    I would like to know the reason that make them install such and OLD driver for the Nvidia chipset. Driver 6.39 was released February 2004. This was the first chipset driver for Nforce 4. It was released together with Nforce 4 chipset.
    Couldn't they just DOWNLOAD a newer one? We are talking about NEW HDD drives here.
  • cryptonomicon - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    hmm, i liked this review alot because i can see the performance of alot of common drives on the market today and see their performance in comparison to each other, regardless to what SATA2 is doing.
  • mechBgon - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    Interestingly, my old Cheetah 15k.3 still spanks my Seagate 7200.8 OMGNCQSATABBQ drive by a factor of about 2:1 on seek-intensive real-world work tasks. People with seek-intensive work to do should still explore the SCSI option if it seems like their I/O is holding up the show.
  • PuravSanghani - Sunday, June 26, 2005 - link

    All graphs should be fixed now.

    We did use Hitachi's Feature tool to enable SATA 3.0Gb/sec mode prior to the benchmarks.

    Purav
  • ArcticOC - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    Was the sata2 mode enabled og the test?! This HAVE to bee done after you buy the drive.. because the deafult speed is to 150MB/sec

    software from hitachi have to be run in order to enable 300mode

    http://forum.hardware.no/index.php?act=Attach&...
  • Viper4185 - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    No graphs for me either! Something is broken!
  • Souka - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    That is one ugly review.

    They should pull it, fix it, then repost
  • ArcticOC - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    I really hope the testers to their time setting sataII mode to the Hitachi, This ahve to be done manually by their software called "IBM feature tool", unless u do this, det disk will run at low sata 150 instead of the 300mode.

    http://forum.hardware.no/index.php?act=Attach&...

    The disk comes by deafults w/interface of only 150.. chech taht this important is used under all test.. anything else would be BS if not
  • GhandiInstinct - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    My raptor still at reign.
  • SocrPlyr - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    Graphs on some pages and not on others in IE6.
    Everything looks great in Firefox

    Josh
  • RMSistight - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    Still no graphs for some pages! I need to read the game loading times!
  • CrystalBay - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    Well looks like I'll be keeping my 120GB 7200.7 a little longer. :)
  • bersl2 - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    And I need to learn to refresh.
  • bersl2 - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    ---quote---
    Our first benchmark shows Western Digital's WD1600JS coming in at second best in pure hard disk performance at 719 IO operations per second while the 74GB 15000RPM Raptor still tops the charts.
    ---quote---

    Um... did I miss something? Aren't Raptors 10k in RPMs?
  • mechBgon - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    Typo on page 3 referring to a 15000rpm Ratpro. They wish :D

    ...errr, 10th post!
  • cryptonomicon - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    eh, a few minutes ago, the review showed up but when i clicky, it goes to search review panel.
  • GhandiInstinct - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    No graphs on some pages still.
  • GhandiInstinct - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    Haha!
  • PuravSanghani - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    When our publisher is away, with HTML we get to play!

    Sorry about that guys...everything should be good now. Do let us know if you see anything odd though.

    Thanks for stopping by!

    Purav
  • pastorjay - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    If I remember right, Wes said that their HTML coder was gone and they were doing all their own coding.
  • Krk3561 - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    graphs wont work for me either
  • ChiefNutz - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    Never mind.
  • ChiefNutz - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    is it just me or is this review coming in without graphs, and a final conclusion?
  • KeithP - Saturday, June 25, 2005 - link

    haha

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