Western Digital Raptor Preview: 10,000RPM & Serial ATA

The Performance Impact of Serial ATA

We took the only drive we had available in both Parallel and Serial ATA versions (8MB buffer Seagate Barracuda ATA V) and combined that with our testbed, a Silicon Image SATA adapter, and ABIT's Serillel adapter in order to generate some real-world results of the impact of each one of these interface combinations on performance.

Content Creation Winstone 2003 System Performance Performance in Winstones (Higher is better) Seagate Barracuda Serial ATA V Seagate Barracuda ATA V Seagate Barracuda ATA V w/ Serial ATA Adapter 48.7 48.7 48.6 | 0 | 10 | 19 | 29 | 39 | 49 | 6

As you can see, there's no real-world performance advantage to going with the Serial ATA interface on today's drives, nor is there a perceivable performance hit when using a Parallel-to-Serial ATA adapter.

Business Winstone 2002 System Performance Performance in Winstones (Higher is better) Seagate Barracuda Serial ATA V Seagate Barracuda ATA V Seagate Barracuda ATA V w/ Serial ATA Adapter 34.3 34.3 34.3 | 0 | 7 | 14 | 21 | 27 | 34 | 41

The story doesn't change in Business Winstone 2002 either, the performance is identical across the board.

So if you want the benefits of Serial ATA without having to buy a brand new hard drive, converters like ABIT's Serillel adapter work perfectly fine.

As far as controller cards go, today's PCI Serial ATA controller cards will be very short lived. In a couple of months Intel will release their 865 and 875 chipsets with native support for two Serial ATA channels in their ICH5 I/O Hub, eliminating the need for an add-in Serial ATA card.

Until then, Silicon Image happens to have one of the more popular controller chips the Sil3112ACT144 that is found on many motherboards as well as on the add-in cards we used for this review (we used the reference Silicon Image card as well as an OEM card from Hypermicro that also used the same Silicon Image chip).