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Finally, we'll
cover the Average Access times of the Barracuda V drive, as
well as let you take a quick gander at all the details for
the Winbench Disk Winmark tests we ran.
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Winbench Business Disk Winmark Details |
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Real World
Performance |
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There really
isn't any mystery in this test. In fact, the new
Barracuda V SATA drive has slightly better average access
times versus the Western Digital ATA100 drive.
However, the differential is marginal and the average end
user would perceive no difference, when you consider it's
only 1/2 a millisecond.
The rest of the
individual test scores for each test in the Winbench suite,
are detailed in the table below. Blue indicates the
fastest scores, red the slowest scores and black is
somewhere in the middle of the pack. The overall Disk
Winmarks that we highlighted in the graphs on the prior
pages here, sum up the results but this information below
may be interesting to comb through at your leisure.
Winbench Disk
Winmark Details
Click image for full view
A Note On
Acoustics Of The Barracuda V SATA Drive:
Seagate claims
this drive is one of the quietest drives on the market right
now, with it's "SoftSonic" motor technology. Indeed
the spindle noise is minimal, as you can barely here the
drive spin up. However, the heads during reads and
writes, make a bit of a racket, frankly. We're not
sure if this is indicative of the early sample drive we
received or of the very same product that will be in the
retail channel. However, during heavy reads and
writes, the drive seems to be louder than most. It's
not unbearable by any means however and once installed in a
chassis, things are perfectly acceptable. In addition,
what most people complain about, when they think of Hard
Drive noise, is spindle or motor whine, since it is a
constant relentless noise. The Barrcuda V is
definitely superior in this regard.
Final Analysis
We can honestly
report to you, that our first experience with Serial ATA was
a pleasant one. We were greeted with a well designed
product, based on a new technology that is better in almost
every way, as compared to the legacy technology it will be
replacing. The merits of Serial ATA technology are
obvious, thinner lower profile cables, increased bandwidth,
hot pluggability and a roadmap for exponential increases in
bandwidth, performance and features. The controller
solutions that are out on the market today, like those we've
shown you here from Promise and Silicon Image, are solid
solutions but still have a bit of maturing to do.
We're hopeful that future chipset and driver revisions, will
provide for better performance and flexibility moving
forward. What's even more exciting is that Intel's
forthcoming (late Q1 - Q2) "Springdale" chipset, is rumored
to have integrated Serial ATA in the Southbridge chip.
As far as the
star of our little show here, a fish called Barracuda, we're
fairly impressed by the initial performance metrics it was
able to live up to. The drive is about on par, with a
high end 7200RPM ATA100 drive with 8MB cache. In some
tests, it surpassed the Western Digital Special Edition
drive and in others in squeaked in just behind it, depending
on which controller chip we were driving it with. RAID
performance on the other hand, was impressive, with these
new Barracuda V drives, as they boasted some of the best
scores we've seen from any RAID 0 array to date. All
told however, we expected a little more performance out of
the new Barracuda V, since it too has an 8MB cache and the
advantage of the SATA 150MB/sec interface behind it.
However, as with many things in life and technology, a
little maturity will go along way. As software
drivers, operating systems and the drives themselves become
more mainstream, we're pretty excited about the prospects of
Serial ATA and the good things companies like Seagate will
do with it.
We're giving the
Seagate Barracuda V Serial ATA Hard Drive a HotHardware Heat
Meter Rating of...
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