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Hardware 11/20/2009 Daily Hardware Reviews
Richard Vertrees - November 20, 2009 1:10 PM
Print E-mail del.icio.us 6 comment(s) - last by amanojaku.. on Nov 22 at 9:18 PM
DailyTech's roundup of hardware reviews from around the web for Friday

Camera
Canon PowerShot S90 @ Trusted Reviews

Case
Thermaltake SD100 mini ITX Home Theater Chassis @ Legit Reviews
SilverStone SG04B-H @ TechwareLabs
CoolerMaster Sileo 500 @ Ninjalane
Lian Li Armorsuit PC-P50 @ PureOverclock
InWin Maelstrom @ Technic3D

CPU
AMD Athlon 2 X3 435 @ Rbmods

Memory
OCZ DDR3 PC3-12800 Intel XMP LV 4GB @ Neoseeker
 
Peripherals
Razer Sphex Gaming Mousepad @ OCModShop

Portable
Novatech X16 HD Pro Notebook @ DriverHeaven
Toshiba Satellite U500-178 @ Trusted Reviews

Storage
AXUS FiT 500E Five-Bay RAID DAS Server @ Tweaktown
Kingston SSDNow V 40GB @ Bjorn3D
QNAP TS-419P NAS @ Benchmark Reviews
Seagate Barracuda XT 2 TB HDD @ Hardware Secrets
Thermaltake BlacX Duet HDD Docking Station @ OCIA

Video Cards
Sapphire Radeon HD 5970 OC @ OCC
Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 @ XSReview
Sapphire Radeon HD 5750 @ Ultimate Hardware
Leadtek GT 220 @ Bjorn3D

 

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Seagate 2TB HD
By sdsdv10 on 11/20/2009 5:51:17 PM , Rating: 2
This is the second review where the new SATA-600 interface has failed to beat the existing SATA-300 drives. I sure hope it does better on SSD's than what we are getting out of traditional mechanical drives.




RE: Seagate 2TB HD
By amanojaku on 11/20/2009 6:56:47 PM , Rating: 2
Are you kidding? SATA transfers at the following rates:

1.5Gbit/sec - 178.81MiB/sec
3.0Gbit/sec - 357.63MiB/sec
6.0Gbit/sec - 715.26MiB/sec

The fastest hard disks (15K SAS & FC) transfer data as fast as 210MiB/sec, and that's only when they're less than 5% full. Your 80% full 7,200RPM can't do half of that. I think the average quote is something like 70-90MiB/sec. The interface is not the issue for mechanical hard drives. SSDs could definitely make use of the bandwidth, but the cost for that fictional drive would be astronomical.


RE: Seagate 2TB HD
By sdsdv10 on 11/22/2009 5:55:03 PM , Rating: 2
Uh, you kind of missed the point. I wasn't talking theoretical maximun speeds, but actual bench numbers for Seagates new 2TB drives with the SATA-600 interface when compared to available drive with the SATA-300 interface.


RE: Seagate 2TB HD
By amanojaku on 11/22/2009 9:18:28 PM , Rating: 2
I didn't miss your point at all. I told you why the 2TB SATA600 isn't faster than the 2TB SATA300. The bottleneck isn't the interface; it's the mechanics of the drive. The drive platters do not spin fast enough, and the read/write head does not move back and forth fast enough.

As a result the maximum burst rate of 277MB (which is 277 x 1000^2 bytes) does not breach the SATA 300Gb (375 X 1000^2 bytes) limit. The burst rate is the cache-to-host rate, meaning the 64MiB disk buffer.

Once the transfer bypasses the cache you are limited by the moving parts. The average transfer rate of 117MB (117 x 1000^2 bytes) is the best the moving parts can do.

Btw:

MiB = Mebibyte = 1024 ^2 bytes
MB = Megabytes = 1000 ^2 bytes
GiB = Gibibytes = 1024 ^3 bytes
GB = Gigabytes = 1000 ^3 bytes
1 Gbit = 125,000,000 bytes ˜ 119.21MiB


RE: Seagate 2TB HD
By AlexTRoopeR on 11/21/2009 6:09:41 AM , Rating: 2
But according to the review the Seagate wins at average transfer, and loses at access speed, against WD top model. So it's not a screw up.

And for a HDD, the interface is the least important. Even at burst they were not maxing the cap of SATA 300.


RE: Seagate 2TB HD
By JumpingJack on 11/21/2009 11:29:02 AM , Rating: 2
Best case you may expect is that SATA-600 drives perform equivalent to SATA-300 drives, all things being equal.

Most all mechanical hard drives use a fraction of the potential BW that the SATA interface provides, increasing the capability of the bus will not help improve transfer rates if the actual device itself is slow to begin with.

Only when such devices as SSDs improve can this become an issues.

SATA-600 is usable and important in large raid arrays, if you have enough drives striped to push the BW envelop.


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