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Data Storage Upgrades Hardware

Hitachi's SATA-II Drive Tested 25

Posted by timothy from the vroom-vroom-the-middle-of-the-pack dept.
Ghost Rider writes "They didn't make much noise about it, but Hardcoreware.net have what looks to be one of first reviews of a SATA-II drive. They Compared the T7K250 from Hitachi to the latest drives from other manufacturers, including Seagate, Maxtor, and Western Digital's Raptor. They performed the tests on the SATA-II capable PDC20579 controller from Promise. It ended up in the middle of the pack in this review, so I'm not sure how much a difference SATA-II is going to make."
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Hitachi's SATA-II Drive Tested More

Hitachi's SATA-II Drive Tested

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  • I would bet most computers in existance dont even use a full speed IDE interface yet, let alone SATA
    • Dollar for dollar IDE and SATA are the same price literally. Though I am convinced SATA never really dominated. The number of places I see using IDE far outpace SATA.

      Only way SATA II will be successful is performing like top SCSI drives at IDE price.

  • Uuh (Score:5, Informative)

    by RzUpAnmsCwrds ( 262647 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2005 @06:06PM (#12297556)
    THERE IS NO SATA II.

    There is a new 3GB/s speed, and there is also NCQ, but there is no "SATA II" specification.

    Read for yourself:

    http://www.sata-io.org/namingguidelines.asp [sata-io.org]

    As for the new 3GB/s speed and NCQ, Maxtor's DiamondMax 10 and Seagate's 7200.8 both support it.

    • Re:Uuh (Score:2, Redundant)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 )
      tsk tsk. the purpose of flashbang review sites like this is not to educate, but to misinform ignorants so that they'll go clickety click buying off shiny pebbles.

      (half jokingly... seriously.. there's shitloads of sites like that one that are low on informed content, high on pictures and very high on just silly myths)
      • I don't get it. They tried to do real world performance tests and the newest, "coolest" of the bunch ended up middle of the pack. How does this equate to perpetuating "silly myths" and pushing "shiny pebbles"?

        Though I'm not familiar with that exact site, it's easy to see it's one of the type that try to give people the exact info they actually need: Whether or not the things you do every day are going to show a human-noticable increase in speed if you buy the "shiny pebble".

        I personally think they deser

  • SATA is just fine for me (Score:3, Insightful)

    by __aaitqo8496 ( 231556 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2005 @06:12PM (#12297614) Journal
    I'm happy just not having big clunky wires. Most PATA desvices did away with Master/Slave settings with the introduction of Cable Select. Since ATA devices can never really max out the theoretical bandwith of the cables, speed becomes a moot point. For now, I like the smaller cables and the fact that my hard drives no longer fight with my optical drives for space on limited cables. SATA II be damned, I'm happy with it's vanilla father.
    • An array could max that out.(and whatnot, multiplexed into one cable, ect)
    • If you've never maxed out the ATA bus, you need to upgrade that 200mhz PPro. One plain-jane IDE hard drive pushes 60+ MB/sec these days. Plug the slave in, you've got 120 MB/sec sustained coming down a 133 MB line. Throw in the awful ATA overhead and everything slows down to a crawl as your drive has to take two passes at the same cylinder just so your host can keep up.

      If they came up with 800 MB/sec busses I would buy it up in a heartbeat. There's no fun having an IDE-Raid array when the limiting fact
    • I'm looking for cheap hotswap for HDDs.

      In theory SATA makes it possible (and should be quite cheap to do).

      Should be able to unmount the drive, cut the power. Wait for spin down. Unlock and remove the drive caddies from the bays.

      Maybe the more expensive stuff would have an autolocking mechanism that prevents you from removing the HDD before the platters have slowed down to safe rpms.

  • The great thing about SATA2 (Score:3, Informative)

    by Xenkar ( 580240 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2005 @06:21PM (#12297688)
    Over two years ago, I read up on SATA2 interface. The thing I really liked about it is the possibility of SATA2 optical drives. A SATA2 DVD+-RW drive would enable us to ditch PATA connectors completely.

    I can't wait until the computer industry finally implements this stuff. I wanted this technology in 2003 when I built my latest computer. I am disappointed to see the industry moving so slowly.

  • Poor review, IMO. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by SunFan ( 845761 )

    The disk busses are all faster than an indivual drive, now, but that didn't stop the authors of the review from hooking up a single drive to do their tests.

    Seriously, folks, the only way your're going to saturate something like a Ultra320 SCSI bus is to use RAID, unless the drives start coming with rediculous cache sizes.
    • exactly!
      The only way to make this speed be used is to "daisy-chain" the drives. Who cares if it can transmit at 3Gb/s, when they are only speaking about between the controller and the 8MB cache? The only way RAID fills the bus is that when one drive is reading, the others are seeking! that doesn't happen with one drive..

      Besides, if they started adding raid 5 into more SATA controllers, the performance would go through the roof. I would much rather have 3 100GB SATA drives, giving me 200GB of storage, tha

      • Re:Poor review, IMO. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by SunFan ( 845761 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2005 @07:25PM (#12298192)
        pop in a 512MB ram chip? that would be sweet!

        Higher-end RAID controllers have RAM on them, so perhaps a "trickle-down" effect could lead to more cache on individual drives. I agree that would be pretty neat, especially on UNIX servers where physical RAM is already used up for other things blocking the filesystem cache.

  • Does the article crash your Firefox? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2005 @08:17PM (#12298549) Homepage

    The referenced article [hardcoreware.net] crashes the latest version of Firefox, but not the latest version of Mozilla.

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