80 and 160 GB SATA Hard Drives Round Up
SATA II hard disk drives7200 rpm, 80 & 160 GB
You don't have to be a gamer to understand the value of hard disk drives. They have been the main stay for storage in PCs for a long time. Like processors, the biggest improvements in size, speed and quality have occured in recent years. The use of more, larger platters have made possible to reach capacities unheard of in desktops several years ago - you can easily find drives with 500 GBs of space nowadays. Storage interface also enjoyed a much needed boost with the introduction of first generation SATA drives and onboard controllers in motherboard chipsets. SATA II brought support for features usually reserved for enterprise use - NCQ, hot swap - to desktop drives.
The introduction of onboard SATA I and II controllers have also propelled the widespread use of RAID, particularly RAID 0 (striping) and 5 (striping with parity). Those who have experience hard drive failures know the value of making backups and of course RAID 1 and 5 fault tolerant capabilities. Most onboard storage controllers now support a variety of RAID levels RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5 are RAID levels commonly supported by various onboard controllers
For the most part, desktop users are more concerned with performance in single drive configurations and RAID 0 (striping). RAID support do offer the capabilities to 'squeeze' more performance out of hard drives, but not without some compromise. Even if they don't use RAID capabilites, users can still use two (or more) drives in their system - one for the systems and applications and the other for data.
Out of the many SATA II hard drives available on the market, the drives we're going to look at today are the 80 and 160 GB Hitachi's Deskstar (HDS721616PLA P220 and HDS728080PLA PF20), Seagate's Barracuda 7200.9 (ST3160211A and ST380211AS) and Western Digital's Caviar SE (WD800AAJS and WD1600AAJS).
Problems
At first, we planned to use the onboard ICH8R SATA controller for testing purposes. Everything ran just fine during our initial tests with the 80 GB Hitachi Deskstar. We followed Intel's advice to use Hitachi's own Ftool utility to enable SATA II mode on the drive as recommended. However, we started noticing very odd behavior when we started testing drives from a different manufacturer, the 80 GB Samsung Spinpoint. Fearing this is caused by defective samples, we return the drives to the local representative in our area. Its when we put both the Western Digital's Caviar SE and Seagate's Barracuda drives that we began to suspect that the problem lies on the controller, not the drive.The problem we saw was quite odd. Any write operation on the drive will cause very high processor loads, something like running a hard drive or CD / DVD-ROM in Programmed I/O (PIO) mode instead of UltraDMA. This basically affects all drives except the Hitachi Deskstar and our own Maxtor DiamondMax 10 drives.. We've tried plugging the cable to different SATA ports, switching cables, falling back to IDE instead of ICH8R's AHCI and RAID mode, even enabling Legacy IDE mode. Nothing seems to work. Driver problems? We're already using the latest, up to date drivers from Intel and driver issues does not explain the flawless performance of the Hitachi and Maxtor drives.
The Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 drives are not as severely affected by this problem, unlike the Western Digital Caviar SE drives. Below is a snapshot of Intel Matrix Storage Console before and after a write operation (copying a file to the drive).
Results with SATA I modes are so irregular, particularly with any write operation, that they are useless for comparison. Obviously it would not represent what the Caviar and Barracuda drives can do. After looking around on the Internet for answers, all we could find was a reference to RAID problems with the ICH8R on some Gigabyte P965-DS3 motherboards. Gigabyte's representative we talked to didn't offer any solution, but suggested updating the BIOS to see if that could help. So, we tried updating the motherboard BIOS to see if that will fix the problem - it didn't. That leaves us with only one solution - use the Gigabyte relabeled J-Micron controller for testing. After some testing, we found no such problems with the J-Micron controller
Although it works, there are several nitpicks we have with the J-Micron controller. First, CPU utilization in RAID 0 are higher compared to Intel ICH8R. CPU utilization seems to be the main culprit for fluctuating transfer rates when testing sequential reads / writes with HD Tach. Second, we feel burst transfer rates testing results with the J-Micron controller are way too inflated to be of any use for comparison - reaching numbers as high as 2.1 GBps. Third, we have no way of seeing whether the drive is operating in SATA I or II mode. With Intel ICH8R, we can use Intel's Matrix Storage Console and confirm the mode by looking at burst transfer rates in HD Tach. The final nitpick is the unability to monitor drive temperature with any SMART monitoring utilities such as SpeedFan.
There are less annoying issues, like the IDE port would stop working in Windows XP when we enable RAID (though, interestingly it works fine with Vista). However, there are several plus points with this controller. The most important one - it does not require a Windows reinstall if you want to change back and forth between IDE, AHCI and RAID modes - unlike Intel ICH8R. With ICH8R, if you do want to change modes, Intel suggested using / installing RAID controller drivers instead of AHCI drivers since it also support AHCI and IDE modes. Or you could force an array to work in AHCI mode (but not recommended). Unfortunately, this is only possible if you install RAID drivers by pressing the 'F6' key when you first install Wndows XP. Motherboard manufacturers also seem to 'conveniently' failed to supply the needed F6 drivers on the bundled driver CD or floppy, so you'll have to download them from Intel. Great. We expect better from Intel, who is supposed to be the leading manufacturer of chipsets and processors. We think this is one area where even ATI / AMD, NVIDIA, VIA and SIS have the upper hand - ease of installation.
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