I don't get it ! Who needs single drive over 1TB ? We all need a wide availability of affordable hardware RAID controllers. RAID6 array of say 8x500GB drives offers speed, reliability & capacity that no single drive can ever dream of. But please no more FakeRAID junk, please.
Given what I know about harddrives, the above results are not terribly surprising. What limits the data bandwidth of a harddrive is the bottleneck between the harddrive controllers and the platters, which is much less than 3Gb/s. This is not going to change anytime soon for mechanical harddrives.
However, for SSDs, there is no such bottleneck. SSD's with SATA 6Gb/s is something more easily realized in the near future. Still, we are going to need to wait about 2 years for the appropriate SSD controllers, dedicated motherboard PCIe lanes, and cheaper faster flash memory, to be developed to allow this to happen.
Seagate has offered free data recovery on the disks that experienced this problem. There is also an easy fix although you have to either buy or make your own custom cable in order to unbrick the drive.
I really like the "less synthetic" IO benches, with the file transfers and all.
Standardized benchmarks are a double-edged sword. On the one hand the standardized benchmark can be reproduced and hence verified, attributing to the credibility. On the other hand, firmware can be tweaked to the benchmarks to skew benchmarks and obscure actual performance.
I'd like to see a mix of standardized and non-standardized (i.e. "Anandtech Benches") more in the future.
I'd like to see real-world scenarios, like game install times, game load times, software builds, anti-virus scanning, etc.
well done for the Storage Bench, to my opinion, this is the only test which should matter to the end user, I would strongly recommend to keep it simple, no heavy and light, only one combination, and find some way to normalize it in comparison to SSD, this would finally allow users to tell which drives are better for them, which makes a difference and worth the premium, there is nothing we can do with pure sequential numbers...and base on my experience PcMark does not tell enough about user experience,
Thanks AnandTech
1. SATA 3 doesn't change anything for current HDDs. That's just as expected, because they'd have done something wrong if the current SATA 2 interface would already have been a limit. The push to higher performance interfaces always preceded their need - and that's good, but nothing to get excited about (either positive or negative).
2. Seagate's performance is.. "mixed", if I choose the most euphemistic words. That's been the case since many years and I still don't understand why people would like them.
As I stated a few months ago when news of this 2TB drive broke, SATA 6.0 is hardly needed on mechanical drives as they're not even fully utilizing SATA 3.0, only a slight benefit from peak rates as this bench shows.
Its quite clear the Marvell controller is also bottlenecked by these mechanical drives and overall less efficient than the Intel controller. The HD to HD transfers show the mechanical drives are typically the bottleneck, but the Intel drives write speeds are also bottlenecks in the HD to SSD benches. The only scenario the mechanical drives aren't bottlenecked is in the SSD to HD test where the high SSD reads allow for the higher mechanical drive transfers.
I would've liked to have seen HD to SSD transfer results with an SSD with faster sustained write speeds, like one of the Indilinx drives that get ~200MB/s writes. I would've also liked to have seen all SSDs tested on one of these SATA 6.0 controllers to truly isolate its performance compared to SATA 3.0. I understand its beyond the scope of this review, it just seems like neither the controller nor the drive are up to the task of achieving potential performance.
Yeah, with port multiplier enclosures data from several drives is transferred over single SATA link. I had port multiplier 4-drive enclosures and with 4 hard drives in RAID0 I was easily maxing out the SATA3Gbps bandwidth.
300 USD for the Premium Asus board as compared to ~170 for a P7P55D pro version just to have 6GB Sata and USB 3.0? That's a steep price to pay for just these two features.
I hate seeing AT falling into the realm of previews. We seem to get more and more of these. Each preview promises followup reviews, but I see less and less follow up reviews or flat out full reviews. Remember when AT reviewed the WD 640gb Blue and the 7200.8s, 7200.10s, all that? Those were nice solid reviews. Now we get previews. Core i7 preview into OCing. No OCing guide today. The only motherboard roundup we got was the 3 or 4 motherboards we had at the i7 launch, while Toms spent 3 or 4 articles doing separate groups of roundups (enthusiasts, midrange, budget X58). I hate THG, and I always respected AT's opinion more, but when we're getting more and more half-assed reviews that are barely finished that DEPEND on follow-ups that aren't always done, then I have a problem.
I'd rather see a solid review and be done with it. I'm glad we got a WD 2TB Black, but are you guys going to review that? AT is definitely leading the charge into the SSD world, but as we're doing it, we're forgetting a lot of nice new drives like the WD 2TB Black that I feel deserves a full review. Same with the new Seagate 7200.12s.
I think that people dont buy 2TB drives for speed. If u hawe TB-s data that u need to store its the only choice. With those read speeds u could watch fine a 500 Mbit video stream. Actualy with 64bit around for years you could have a 32GB system with for example 24GB ram disk. And ram disk working with intesive read write workload is like 100 times faster than the best ssd. But its actualy rare to have 4+ GB memory still. I think that the storage will be in future in levels like CPU cache. L1 storage smaller for used data and L2 for storage of large data. Or even a ram level (actualy cpu memmory should be divided in levels long ago, buying 32GB of very fast memmory is overkill.U could hawe 2GB realy fast memory and a very cheap 32GB memory which is still much faster than anything else)
Everyone who can use brain already know that 6Gb/s sata is just a marketing buzz unless u use a giant raid.
Actually, as I went up to 1TB and larger drives I started wishing for more speed too. I use 1.5TB and 2TB disks as backups and mirrors and full backups of terabytes of files take a long time:)
You need to be patient. It wont change any time soon. Even with ssd speeds backup TB-s of data takes hours.
Hint: Dont backup that often :)
Maybe there are some programs that monitor only files that were changed and only backup those, not the whole drive. If u want backup that often.
Like another user has already mentioned, there is port multiplier technology, which is about the only thing that can use this additional bandwidth _right_now_ . Even then, the drives must be in some form of RAID, and if for performance, you're still going to see access time "doubling".
The point here would be I think if people cared that much about performance, they would opt for at minimum an inexpensive SSD that performs decent for a SSD, and completely destroys any mechanical drive. This is not to say that I think your tests are null and void. This *IS* to say that I think that people are going to be more worried about reliability concerning these drives, not so much about performance as long as the performance is close to something reasonable for the technology. I think both drives in this test have demonstrated this level of performance.
Now if you guys really want to impress us mere mortals with numbers, let us see you guys at Anandtech put two iSCSI targets with 32GB of ramdisk each out to a single initiator as a RAID 0 array. Then watch how the drive visible on the initiator smokes all of your tests ;)
Wait until Starwind implements "true" RAID 0 over multiple links the correct way, and it will be even "funner".
"Like another user has already mentioned, there is port multiplier technology, which is about the only thing that can use this additional bandwidth _right_now_ . Even then, the drives must be in some form of RAID, and if for performance, you're still going to see access time "doubling"."
No, they dont have to be in any form of RAID. With a PM you can hook them up as individual drives if you want. My point was and still is that with a PM you can saturate a 6Gb/s port that way - but that would be sort of pointless unless you need to hook up more drives than you can attach to your motherboard by using the one-drive-per-port scheme. But if you do need this, this Sata 6Gb/s thing starts to make sense even with spindle drives.
If you do not RAID them on a port multiplier, you gain no performance. Read the white papers on SATAIO if you doubt me. As I have known about this technology for more than 5 years now.
You can run singles on a port multiplier if you wish, but only one drive will be able to communicate with the system at a time. This is not a bad thing really, because PM will allow you technically up to 15 more drives per port I believe( 16 devices total like SCSI ), but the highest number of drives allowed on current hardware available is only 5 drives per port.
Another downside to port multipliers is that is is all handled in software.Either you use the software provided by the manufacturer, or it is handled in hardware like fake RAID. In the end, it is all software, whether embedded, or not. Also, you require specific chipsets in order for this technology to work at all. In he end, it is not a terrible idea, but SAS puts it to shame. The only downside to SAS is that you require an SAS expander per 8 drives. Since expanders are not cheap, the cost mounts up pretty quickly. Still, it is by far the superior technology.
I agree with the other writers on here, no need for sata 6gb/s. I believe we are at the mechanical limit with 3 gb/s sata with spinning platters. I believe we will see differences when SSD starts utilizing it. Right now drives in raid0 configuration get much better mb/s times than these tests.
We aren't necessarily at any limit, just that controller throughput is always well ahead of hard drive throughput. This has been the case since we had hard drive controllers installed in the ISA bus. It's always some great new throughput of the controller that the hard drives can't take advantage of yet.
It's still a good thing though, because you don't want to be in the case where you have a traffic jam on your 2 lane highway 100% of the time before you add a new lane. If that were the case all the drives now would be on PATA/100. It's much better when the controller leaps are not very exciting. The manufacturers are doing their job if controller throughput leaps aren't exciting.
That's also correct from what I've read, the P55 is PCIE 2.0 but the ICH10R is only PCIE 1.1. It could very well be an attempt to prevent choking up the DMI bus, but knowing Intel, I wouldn't doubt it if the decision was made so X58 and P55 wouldn't feature-compete with each other or offer a competitive advantage to outside solutions before they rolled out their own native SATA 6.0 and USB 3.0 solution. That's really why we're seeing all these workarounds to begin with, because Intel has been dragging their feet on adopting and implementing these specs.
The catch is that PCI-E 1.x is 250MB/s aggregate bandwidth, but half of that is upstream and half is downstream. So the 500MB/s figure for two PCI-E 2.0 lanes is correct in that the maximum rate to or from the drive would be 500MB/s.
Get a port multiplier and hook up 4 of them per channel - watch the bandwith put to good use, if you actually need it.
Now do the same with all the other ports and you got a, for a desktop system, ridiculous amount of storage capacity with all disks capable of operating at their best sequential read/write performance.
This is what I expected- there is no real need for 6Gb/S SATA.
SAS, on the other hand, which (for lower speeds, at least) uses the same connector technology, has a real need for 6Gb/S, since there is typically a RAID on the other end of the SAS cable.
Unfortunately, I didn't see even a passing mention of when, or if, this technology is coming to SAS.
Did you get your 3G and 6G mixed up? If not your first 2 charts showing your custom HD tests show the 6G 15-20% slower than the 3G. Your commentary doesn't say anything about the 3G/6G comparison, only the differences between the brands...
2TB Performance? Who cares... Give us more Anand Home Theater blogs! Now those are interesting!
All we really want to know is if these new Seagates are more reliable than the Seagate 7200.11s or the WD Greens. In fact if you look at all of the drives over 1TB there are VERY FEW that are reliable.
The HD manufacturers need to forget 2tb and move to 4tb drives asap. My blu-ray backups already take up 5 Terabytes and it's growing exponentially.
If we wanted HD performance we'd be reading your SSD articles ;)
bluray backups...maaan are u nuts? :))
this is an example with:"don't do this at home" :))
Woa you should have seen my 'weddings' bluray movie backup: it takes 2000TB maan i've attended to many weddings:)
Second thoughts: seriously thinking in asking IBM or Google to host my backups:))
We all care about 2T performance nice review. Thanks for touching on things we all care about!!
Nobody gives a fuck about 4T drives especially when only one person is crying like a weenie. Especially when that weenie is so misinformed about the reliability of drives ovcer 1T!!!
"All we really want to know is if these new Seagates are more reliable than the Seagate 7200.11s or the WD Greens. In fact if you look at all of the drives over 1TB there are VERY FEW that are reliable."
Exactly. The only thing that is really important with these large drives is how reliable they are. Youc an't really inlcude that in a review of a new product, but really this is way more important than all the other benchmarks. These drives are used for backup and storage and need to be reliable.
I don't really care about individual drive reliability. There is no drive that is 100% reliable, and as long as you take proper precautions, drive failures are inconsequential.
SIlly person, dont you see where the true potential of these lay?
I would order 1000 of these for a server farm based on the simple fact that in the tests they are taking -1% CPU time. Over 1000 of these drives thats 10x cpu performance! =D
Wow Silly person that's an insult. Well Mr name caller, I would let you know that if you bought 1000 of these and ran your sever farm on SSD drives specifically, especially watching for upgrades in SSD tech you would be loosing. The SSD debate is over anyway now, as Intel said today that SSD drives could not diminish in nand size past 22nm today. What this means is that if it is at 32nm and we go by there tick/tock theory, and we also look at how fast this technology has been moving is, you would have no more than a year and a half max on your time line. After that there will be no greater Nand flash drives. So your server farm would die in a year and a half. I imagine you would recognize a return on your investment in 2-3 years. So if your giving away money I'll send you my address.
Can you reference the article where intel said it can't move past 22 nm? That's odd as they announced a couple days ago that they could get down to 5 nm...?? weird O_o
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rachotilko - Tuesday, November 10, 2009 - link
I don't get it ! Who needs single drive over 1TB ? We all need a wide availability of affordable hardware RAID controllers. RAID6 array of say 8x500GB drives offers speed, reliability & capacity that no single drive can ever dream of. But please no more FakeRAID junk, please.abuda - Monday, November 2, 2009 - link
how about this stuff ?http://www.mwave.com/mwave/SKUSearch_v3.asp?px=IM&...">http://www.mwave.com/mwave/SKUSearch_v3.asp?px=IM&...
without shipping
mindless1 - Sunday, November 1, 2009 - link
utilizing the word utilize can become excessivesonofliberty - Sunday, November 1, 2009 - link
should run a RAID 0 benchmark on all drive to see the benefits of SATA 6GB/smichael19 - Saturday, October 31, 2009 - link
are the forums ever coming back?Nocturnal - Saturday, October 31, 2009 - link
Anand said via Twitter that he'd have a better ETA this weekend. So hopefully we'll get some type of update.ClagMaster - Friday, October 30, 2009 - link
Given what I know about harddrives, the above results are not terribly surprising. What limits the data bandwidth of a harddrive is the bottleneck between the harddrive controllers and the platters, which is much less than 3Gb/s. This is not going to change anytime soon for mechanical harddrives.However, for SSDs, there is no such bottleneck. SSD's with SATA 6Gb/s is something more easily realized in the near future. Still, we are going to need to wait about 2 years for the appropriate SSD controllers, dedicated motherboard PCIe lanes, and cheaper faster flash memory, to be developed to allow this to happen.
Not a bad article, but SATA 6Gb/s on harddrives?
Rouche - Friday, October 30, 2009 - link
My last disk (7200.11 firmware error) got into a BSY state after 6 month of use, lost everything, no support to recover my data.Even if i had a gun on the head, i would never touch a Seagate disk.
Nocturnal - Saturday, October 31, 2009 - link
Seagate has offered free data recovery on the disks that experienced this problem. There is also an easy fix although you have to either buy or make your own custom cable in order to unbrick the drive.Rouche - Monday, November 2, 2009 - link
Seagate has offered? Im sure they yelled this on every houses roof!Of course i tryed the custum unbrick with serial communication but it seems to worse. My luck i guess.
ipay - Monday, November 2, 2009 - link
Buying or making a custom cable is the exact opposite of "easy" for people who expected the drive to work as advertised.SpatulaCity - Friday, October 30, 2009 - link
I always thought there were 8 bits in a byte.6Gbps / 8 = 750MBps
am I confused or missing something?
peldor - Friday, October 30, 2009 - link
8/10 encoding.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10/8_encoding">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10/8_encoding
coyote2 - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
I'd love to see how the (budget) Hitachi 7200rpm compares to the WD Caviar Black and this Seagate XT. thanks AnandTech!dragunover - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
Reviews around the net show this is a great performer. Why not test more hard-drives like this one?Robear - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
I really like the "less synthetic" IO benches, with the file transfers and all.Standardized benchmarks are a double-edged sword. On the one hand the standardized benchmark can be reproduced and hence verified, attributing to the credibility. On the other hand, firmware can be tweaked to the benchmarks to skew benchmarks and obscure actual performance.
I'd like to see a mix of standardized and non-standardized (i.e. "Anandtech Benches") more in the future.
I'd like to see real-world scenarios, like game install times, game load times, software builds, anti-virus scanning, etc.
MadMan007 - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
So SATA 6Gb/s implemented by an add-on chip will do little but add cost? Great :/motigez - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
well done for the Storage Bench, to my opinion, this is the only test which should matter to the end user, I would strongly recommend to keep it simple, no heavy and light, only one combination, and find some way to normalize it in comparison to SSD, this would finally allow users to tell which drives are better for them, which makes a difference and worth the premium, there is nothing we can do with pure sequential numbers...and base on my experience PcMark does not tell enough about user experience,Thanks AnandTech
MrSpadge - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
There are 2 things to take away from this:1. SATA 3 doesn't change anything for current HDDs. That's just as expected, because they'd have done something wrong if the current SATA 2 interface would already have been a limit. The push to higher performance interfaces always preceded their need - and that's good, but nothing to get excited about (either positive or negative).
2. Seagate's performance is.. "mixed", if I choose the most euphemistic words. That's been the case since many years and I still don't understand why people would like them.
chizow - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
As I stated a few months ago when news of this 2TB drive broke, SATA 6.0 is hardly needed on mechanical drives as they're not even fully utilizing SATA 3.0, only a slight benefit from peak rates as this bench shows.Its quite clear the Marvell controller is also bottlenecked by these mechanical drives and overall less efficient than the Intel controller. The HD to HD transfers show the mechanical drives are typically the bottleneck, but the Intel drives write speeds are also bottlenecks in the HD to SSD benches. The only scenario the mechanical drives aren't bottlenecked is in the SSD to HD test where the high SSD reads allow for the higher mechanical drive transfers.
I would've liked to have seen HD to SSD transfer results with an SSD with faster sustained write speeds, like one of the Indilinx drives that get ~200MB/s writes. I would've also liked to have seen all SSDs tested on one of these SATA 6.0 controllers to truly isolate its performance compared to SATA 3.0. I understand its beyond the scope of this review, it just seems like neither the controller nor the drive are up to the task of achieving potential performance.
Zak - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
Yeah, with port multiplier enclosures data from several drives is transferred over single SATA link. I had port multiplier 4-drive enclosures and with 4 hard drives in RAID0 I was easily maxing out the SATA3Gbps bandwidth.Z.
chrnochime - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
300 USD for the Premium Asus board as compared to ~170 for a P7P55D pro version just to have 6GB Sata and USB 3.0? That's a steep price to pay for just these two features.chrnochime - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
and it's 6Gb not GB whoops.Affectionate-Bed-980 - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
I hate seeing AT falling into the realm of previews. We seem to get more and more of these. Each preview promises followup reviews, but I see less and less follow up reviews or flat out full reviews. Remember when AT reviewed the WD 640gb Blue and the 7200.8s, 7200.10s, all that? Those were nice solid reviews. Now we get previews. Core i7 preview into OCing. No OCing guide today. The only motherboard roundup we got was the 3 or 4 motherboards we had at the i7 launch, while Toms spent 3 or 4 articles doing separate groups of roundups (enthusiasts, midrange, budget X58). I hate THG, and I always respected AT's opinion more, but when we're getting more and more half-assed reviews that are barely finished that DEPEND on follow-ups that aren't always done, then I have a problem.I'd rather see a solid review and be done with it. I'm glad we got a WD 2TB Black, but are you guys going to review that? AT is definitely leading the charge into the SSD world, but as we're doing it, we're forgetting a lot of nice new drives like the WD 2TB Black that I feel deserves a full review. Same with the new Seagate 7200.12s.
Zool - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
I think that people dont buy 2TB drives for speed. If u hawe TB-s data that u need to store its the only choice. With those read speeds u could watch fine a 500 Mbit video stream. Actualy with 64bit around for years you could have a 32GB system with for example 24GB ram disk. And ram disk working with intesive read write workload is like 100 times faster than the best ssd. But its actualy rare to have 4+ GB memory still. I think that the storage will be in future in levels like CPU cache. L1 storage smaller for used data and L2 for storage of large data. Or even a ram level (actualy cpu memmory should be divided in levels long ago, buying 32GB of very fast memmory is overkill.U could hawe 2GB realy fast memory and a very cheap 32GB memory which is still much faster than anything else)Everyone who can use brain already know that 6Gb/s sata is just a marketing buzz unless u use a giant raid.
Zak - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
Actually, as I went up to 1TB and larger drives I started wishing for more speed too. I use 1.5TB and 2TB disks as backups and mirrors and full backups of terabytes of files take a long time:)Zool - Friday, October 30, 2009 - link
You need to be patient. It wont change any time soon. Even with ssd speeds backup TB-s of data takes hours.Hint: Dont backup that often :)
Maybe there are some programs that monitor only files that were changed and only backup those, not the whole drive. If u want backup that often.
yyrkoon - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
Like another user has already mentioned, there is port multiplier technology, which is about the only thing that can use this additional bandwidth _right_now_ . Even then, the drives must be in some form of RAID, and if for performance, you're still going to see access time "doubling".The point here would be I think if people cared that much about performance, they would opt for at minimum an inexpensive SSD that performs decent for a SSD, and completely destroys any mechanical drive. This is not to say that I think your tests are null and void. This *IS* to say that I think that people are going to be more worried about reliability concerning these drives, not so much about performance as long as the performance is close to something reasonable for the technology. I think both drives in this test have demonstrated this level of performance.
Now if you guys really want to impress us mere mortals with numbers, let us see you guys at Anandtech put two iSCSI targets with 32GB of ramdisk each out to a single initiator as a RAID 0 array. Then watch how the drive visible on the initiator smokes all of your tests ;)
Wait until Starwind implements "true" RAID 0 over multiple links the correct way, and it will be even "funner".
Griswold - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
"Like another user has already mentioned, there is port multiplier technology, which is about the only thing that can use this additional bandwidth _right_now_ . Even then, the drives must be in some form of RAID, and if for performance, you're still going to see access time "doubling"."No, they dont have to be in any form of RAID. With a PM you can hook them up as individual drives if you want. My point was and still is that with a PM you can saturate a 6Gb/s port that way - but that would be sort of pointless unless you need to hook up more drives than you can attach to your motherboard by using the one-drive-per-port scheme. But if you do need this, this Sata 6Gb/s thing starts to make sense even with spindle drives.
yyrkoon - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
If you do not RAID them on a port multiplier, you gain no performance. Read the white papers on SATAIO if you doubt me. As I have known about this technology for more than 5 years now.You can run singles on a port multiplier if you wish, but only one drive will be able to communicate with the system at a time. This is not a bad thing really, because PM will allow you technically up to 15 more drives per port I believe( 16 devices total like SCSI ), but the highest number of drives allowed on current hardware available is only 5 drives per port.
Another downside to port multipliers is that is is all handled in software.Either you use the software provided by the manufacturer, or it is handled in hardware like fake RAID. In the end, it is all software, whether embedded, or not. Also, you require specific chipsets in order for this technology to work at all. In he end, it is not a terrible idea, but SAS puts it to shame. The only downside to SAS is that you require an SAS expander per 8 drives. Since expanders are not cheap, the cost mounts up pretty quickly. Still, it is by far the superior technology.
Transisto - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
Port multiplier technology are often used for external raid unit over a single Esata.That would be a good use,
As for the article,,,,,,, did someone at Anand really though a "nothing special" HDD would saturate 3Gb/s ? I wonder if even 5% of readers though so.
Captainbob001 - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
I agree with the other writers on here, no need for sata 6gb/s. I believe we are at the mechanical limit with 3 gb/s sata with spinning platters. I believe we will see differences when SSD starts utilizing it. Right now drives in raid0 configuration get much better mb/s times than these tests.Concillian - Friday, October 30, 2009 - link
We aren't necessarily at any limit, just that controller throughput is always well ahead of hard drive throughput. This has been the case since we had hard drive controllers installed in the ISA bus. It's always some great new throughput of the controller that the hard drives can't take advantage of yet.It's still a good thing though, because you don't want to be in the case where you have a traffic jam on your 2 lane highway 100% of the time before you add a new lane. If that were the case all the drives now would be on PATA/100. It's much better when the controller leaps are not very exciting. The manufacturers are doing their job if controller throughput leaps aren't exciting.
zephyrprime - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
Pcie 1.0 was 250mb/s for each lane but isn't pcie 2.0 500mb/s for each lane? I would think a p55 board would have pcie 2.0, right?
kureshii - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
IIRC the P55's PCIe lanes are 2.0-specced, but bandwidth-limited to PCIe 1.1 speeds to prevent choking up the DMI bus.chizow - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
That's also correct from what I've read, the P55 is PCIE 2.0 but the ICH10R is only PCIE 1.1. It could very well be an attempt to prevent choking up the DMI bus, but knowing Intel, I wouldn't doubt it if the decision was made so X58 and P55 wouldn't feature-compete with each other or offer a competitive advantage to outside solutions before they rolled out their own native SATA 6.0 and USB 3.0 solution. That's really why we're seeing all these workarounds to begin with, because Intel has been dragging their feet on adopting and implementing these specs.JarredWalton - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
The catch is that PCI-E 1.x is 250MB/s aggregate bandwidth, but half of that is upstream and half is downstream. So the 500MB/s figure for two PCI-E 2.0 lanes is correct in that the maximum rate to or from the drive would be 500MB/s.Griswold - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
Get a port multiplier and hook up 4 of them per channel - watch the bandwith put to good use, if you actually need it.Now do the same with all the other ports and you got a, for a desktop system, ridiculous amount of storage capacity with all disks capable of operating at their best sequential read/write performance.
:P
yyrkoon - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
A good SAS controller would trump port multipliers using 2 channels cascaded.Griswold - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
Yea, just that nobody is talking about SAS in this context...HangFire - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
This is what I expected- there is no real need for 6Gb/S SATA.SAS, on the other hand, which (for lower speeds, at least) uses the same connector technology, has a real need for 6Gb/S, since there is typically a RAID on the other end of the SAS cable.
Unfortunately, I didn't see even a passing mention of when, or if, this technology is coming to SAS.
7Enigma - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
Anand,Did you get your 3G and 6G mixed up? If not your first 2 charts showing your custom HD tests show the 6G 15-20% slower than the 3G. Your commentary doesn't say anything about the 3G/6G comparison, only the differences between the brands...
7Enigma - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
Yikes, I completely misread your comments. That's what I get for posting before double-checking. Please disregard my initial post!Pastuch - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
2TB Performance? Who cares... Give us more Anand Home Theater blogs! Now those are interesting!All we really want to know is if these new Seagates are more reliable than the Seagate 7200.11s or the WD Greens. In fact if you look at all of the drives over 1TB there are VERY FEW that are reliable.
The HD manufacturers need to forget 2tb and move to 4tb drives asap. My blu-ray backups already take up 5 Terabytes and it's growing exponentially.
If we wanted HD performance we'd be reading your SSD articles ;)
falc0ne - Thursday, November 5, 2009 - link
bluray backups...maaan are u nuts? :))this is an example with:"don't do this at home" :))
Woa you should have seen my 'weddings' bluray movie backup: it takes 2000TB maan i've attended to many weddings:)
Second thoughts: seriously thinking in asking IBM or Google to host my backups:))
JEDIYoda - Friday, October 30, 2009 - link
We all care about 2T performance nice review. Thanks for touching on things we all care about!!Nobody gives a fuck about 4T drives especially when only one person is crying like a weenie. Especially when that weenie is so misinformed about the reliability of drives ovcer 1T!!!
Muahahaha
kmmatney - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
"All we really want to know is if these new Seagates are more reliable than the Seagate 7200.11s or the WD Greens. In fact if you look at all of the drives over 1TB there are VERY FEW that are reliable."Exactly. The only thing that is really important with these large drives is how reliable they are. Youc an't really inlcude that in a review of a new product, but really this is way more important than all the other benchmarks. These drives are used for backup and storage and need to be reliable.
Gholam - Monday, November 2, 2009 - link
I don't really care about individual drive reliability. There is no drive that is 100% reliable, and as long as you take proper precautions, drive failures are inconsequential.SunSamurai - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link
SIlly person, dont you see where the true potential of these lay?I would order 1000 of these for a server farm based on the simple fact that in the tests they are taking -1% CPU time. Over 1000 of these drives thats 10x cpu performance! =D
atlmann10 - Friday, October 30, 2009 - link
Wow Silly person that's an insult. Well Mr name caller, I would let you know that if you bought 1000 of these and ran your sever farm on SSD drives specifically, especially watching for upgrades in SSD tech you would be loosing. The SSD debate is over anyway now, as Intel said today that SSD drives could not diminish in nand size past 22nm today. What this means is that if it is at 32nm and we go by there tick/tock theory, and we also look at how fast this technology has been moving is, you would have no more than a year and a half max on your time line. After that there will be no greater Nand flash drives. So your server farm would die in a year and a half. I imagine you would recognize a return on your investment in 2-3 years. So if your giving away money I'll send you my address.lyeoh - Friday, October 30, 2009 - link
Wow you don't get it.Go look at the HD Tune benchmark again. At the time I'm posting this, the "CPU usage" at the bottom right says -1.0%.
See the minus sign?
Do you understand now?
SunSamurai - Friday, October 30, 2009 - link
lyeoh, youve restored my faith in humanity!If only people would use their brains instead of lurking for a post to flame.
lyeoh - Monday, November 2, 2009 - link
But how do you know I'm human? I could be an AI program that's being tested on forums.Doesn't it seem to you that some of the posters could be AIs given the sort of comments they make? ;)
tomaccogoats - Friday, October 30, 2009 - link
Can you reference the article where intel said it can't move past 22 nm? That's odd as they announced a couple days ago that they could get down to 5 nm...?? weird O_ohttp://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/28/pcms_annou...">http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/28/pcms_annou...
theWhip - Tuesday, June 29, 2010 - link
What about 2TB SATA 6GB/s and RAID-Controllers with ROC 1200MHZ 6GB/s 16x or 24x?? The speed must be really good?