Investigating SATA 6Gbps Performance

Conclusions

As it currently stands, compared to a drive of equal standing such as the Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB, the Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB is no faster in the raw numbers, unless your software specifically works out of the increased burst speed SATA 6Gbps offers. However, to its detriment, the Seagate is uniformly slower in random access than the Western Digital whatever the motherboard and SATA port it's plugged into.

Modern OS's such as Windows 7 cache plenty of data to compensate for a hard drive's much slower performance (compared to CPU cache and main system memory), so it's often difficult to tell the real effects of a hard drive anyway.

The performance in FC-Test fritters back and forth in particularly circumstances, but there's certainly no overall winner from either motherboard or hard drive. Right now, it simply doesn't matter because mechanical hard drives don't even nearly saturate the current SATA 3Gbps bus, let alone needing 6Gbps.

The P55 chipset and Intel Matrix Storage drivers mean the performance of the native 3Gbps SATA ports are faster than the Marvell chipset particularly in the write performance, but that doesn't show a considerable difference in FC-Test.


SSD drives are already pushing 250MB/s, not to mention more expensive ones that already require a PCI-Express x4 slot for the extra bandwidth. When OCZ and others launch their SATA 6Gbps SSD products in 2010 (we're hearing some may arrive before Christmas - Ed.) we suspect we'll see a proper need for SATA 6Gbps, and by that time we hope Intel and AMD integrate it into their southbridge to maximise performance, or at least when Intel finally integrates PCI-Express Gen 2 into its PCH southbridges.

SATA 6Gbps, like USB 3.0, is a necessary evolution we certainly want, but we wouldn't go out of our way to "future proof" with either right now.