SATA II to the Power of 3.0Gb/sec: Three Drives Reviewed
by Purav Sanghani on June 25, 2005 7:06 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Real World Tests - Game Level Load Times
We have changed our Game Level Loading Time test to include two of the latest games, Doom 3 and Half-Life 2. Because of their high resolution textures and the large levels, the loading time for the levels of each game are long enough to help show a difference between each drive.
We have also included an older strategy game Command & Conquer: Generals because of its longer level load times. Though the game is a couple years old it still proves to be a good measure of performance data loading performance.
Though 30.767 seconds may not seem like much of a performance boost from Seagate's Barracudas' ~32sec chart toppers, Western Digital's WD1600JS came in at first which is a huge improvement over its 10,000RPM Raptor cousin. And even with NCQ enabled, the HD160JJ and T7K250 were not able to keep up quite as well with 33-36sec loading times
The Barracudas still hang on to first place spots when loading Half-Life 2's d1_canals_01 map. Our SATA300 drives barely broke the 20sec mark.
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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/secsoftware 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. :)