Synthetic Benchmarks

Synthetic benchmarks are generally based around an algorithm that is designed to stress the component is a specific manner to test the limits of the given hardware. In the case of hard drive testing, the two synthetic benchmarks that I am using are FutureMark's PCMark2003 and SiSoft's Sandra. Only the Drive composite score from PCMark2002 and the File System Drive Index from SiSoft Sandra are being used as these specifically related to the performance of the hard drive. In both cases, a higher score is preferred since the tests are looking at drive throughput.

In the case of the synthetic benchmarks, the clear winner is the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 drive. Its scores were approximately 50% better in the PCMark2002 Drive test and 26% faster in the Sandra File System scores. The Seagate drive is a bit more of a disappointment as the scores were only slightly better than the Western Digital ATA/100 hard drive.

Application Benchmarks

Application benchmarks differ from synthetic benchmarks in they use specific applications or portions of application code to simulate real world usage and how the hardware performs under these applications. My intention was to use the Business Winstone® 2002 and MultiMedia Content Creation WinStone® 2003 tests from eTesting Labs for this, but due to several problems with obtaining the benchmarks I was forced to use the older WinBench® 99 version 2.0 benchmark instead. WinBench® 99 uses some older applications for its tests, but they are a broad range that would still apply for many users out there.

All tests were run on the hardware, software and drivers mentioned previously and done without verification by eTesting Labs.

It's interesting to note that the Disk Transfer Test was unable to complete properly with the Seagate Barracuda V drive. Due to the age of the benchmark in question and the fact that the Seagate drive is built around native Serial ATA controllers its not that much of a surprise. The results were presented for completeness and the Disk Transfer tests were not factored into my final conclusions.

The Business versus High-End WinMark^TM results paint an interesting picture. In the case of the Business WinMark^TM score, the Seagate Barracuda V is very competitive with the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus. The Western Digital drive fell behind the two Serial ATA drives in the Business Winmark^TM score, but when it came to the High-End WinMark^TM score, it surpassed the Seagate drive, but still fell far behind the Maxtor.

Conclusions

Overall, the performance of the Serial ATA drives is higher than most current ATA based hard drives. Of the two of them, the Maxtor is the clear winner for overall performance. Through all the benchmarks it was consistently higher than the Seagate drive. Seagate is not sitting around though as their next generation Serial ATA Barracuda 7200.7 drive is scheduled for release in the coming months. Of course this additional performance does come at a price. Both the Maxtor and Seagate hard drives are priced higher than their equivalent ATA based drives.

Serial ATA technology is still missing from many of the systems available on the market. And of the ones that have been released, only the recent Intel 875P workstation chipset has actually implemented a native Serial ATA controller built into the motherboard chipset. All other systems currently available use Serial ATA controllers integrated onto the motherboard that uses the PCI bus just like a PCI adapter card.

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