Hard Disks - S-ATA II Tyldesley
Although S-ATA II doubles the theoretical maximum throughput from 150MB/sec to 300MB/sec, even the latest drives don't offer anywhere near that level of sustained transfer rate. So it would appear that rather than being a necessity, SATA II is more for future proofing.
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Hard Disks - S-ATA II
The next generation of S-ATA arrived with more of a whimper than a bang. Hard disks supporting the new S-ATA II standard only began slowly trickling out a few months ago, and only the very latest motherboard chipsets natively support them too - Nvidia nForce4 and Intel 945P/955X being the most notable. And although S-ATA II doubles the theoretical maximum throughput from 150MB/sec to 300MB/sec, even the latest drives don't offer anywhere near that level of sustained transfer rate. So it would appear that rather than being a necessity, SATA II is more for future proofing.
However, faster transfer rates aren't the only new feature S-ATA II has to offer. The real potential performance benefit that S-ATA II drives offer comes from Native Command Queuing (NCQ), which streamlines the way in which data is accessed from a hard disk. NCQ works by queuing up more than one data request, and then ordering and executing these requests; this means that the disk's read/write heads move more economically in relation to the arrangement of data on the disk, which results in higher throughput. Although some manufacturers claim that NCQ is targeted more at servers, our tests showed that it can have a noticeable effect when lots of little files need to be read at once, such as when loading a new game level.
Most drives now exceed 80GB per platter, which was the norm a couple of years ago, and some offer 16MB of cache, instead of the 8MB that was common last year. So here, we've pulled together seven of the latest S-ATA drives, a number of which offer native S-ATA II support. All of the major manufacturers are included, except Maxtor, which is due to launch a new range just weeks after we go to press and was unable to supply us with samples in time. Considering the increased data density, S-ATA II and NCQ features of these latest drives, we were expecting them to perform significantly faster than the drives tested in last year's hard disk Labs test. In most cases, we weren't disappointed. Read on to find out which drives hit the bullseye, and which were wide of the target.
However, faster transfer rates aren't the only new feature S-ATA II has to offer. The real potential performance benefit that S-ATA II drives offer comes from Native Command Queuing (NCQ), which streamlines the way in which data is accessed from a hard disk. NCQ works by queuing up more than one data request, and then ordering and executing these requests; this means that the disk's read/write heads move more economically in relation to the arrangement of data on the disk, which results in higher throughput. Although some manufacturers claim that NCQ is targeted more at servers, our tests showed that it can have a noticeable effect when lots of little files need to be read at once, such as when loading a new game level.
Most drives now exceed 80GB per platter, which was the norm a couple of years ago, and some offer 16MB of cache, instead of the 8MB that was common last year. So here, we've pulled together seven of the latest S-ATA drives, a number of which offer native S-ATA II support. All of the major manufacturers are included, except Maxtor, which is due to launch a new range just weeks after we go to press and was unable to supply us with samples in time. Considering the increased data density, S-ATA II and NCQ features of these latest drives, we were expecting them to perform significantly faster than the drives tested in last year's hard disk Labs test. In most cases, we weren't disappointed. Read on to find out which drives hit the bullseye, and which were wide of the target.
Author: James Morris
