Performance Testing Methods

Seagate was kind enough to provide a PCI serial ATA interface card so that I can minimize the influence of the motherboard and also because the card, made by SIIG Inc, will eliminate any sort of compatiblity issues, if any at all.

Also, when working with SATA PCI cards, you're going to want the latest version of the drivers.  Tests with early drivers for the SIIG card yielded some startlingly low performance scores.

My test system is comprised of the following:

Processor: AMD Athlon XP 1700+ @ 2.0GHz (2400+)
Motherboard: Asus A7N8X nForce2
Memory: Kingston HyperX PC3500 2x256MB
Graphics: MSI GeForce4 Ti4200 64MB
OS: Windows XP Professional with SP1

The following programs were used for performance benchmarking:

TCD Labs HD Tach (v 2.61)
SiSoftware Sandra (v 2003.3.9.44)
ZD Media Winbench 99
ATTO ExpressPCI Utilities (v 1.63)

Results - WinBench 99 and SiSoft Sandra

The SATA drive holds a very slight advantage over the PATA in Winbench 99, which doesn't tell us much.  The same holds true for the Sandra tests.

Next Page: (3)

Page 1: Page 2: Page 3: Page 4: Page 5: