Test System Setup

Processor: Intel Pentium 4 660 (800MHz FSB) (Supplied by Intel)

Memory: 2x Corsair 512MB DDR2-800 (Supplied by Corsair)

Motherboard: ASUS P5WD2 Premium (Supplied by ASUS)

Graphics Card: ASUS Radeon X800XT Platinum (Supplied by ASUS )

Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP SP2

For our testing we used the ASUS P5WD2 Premium motherboard with the ICH7-R SB. Only Intel and nVidia have full SATA-II standard support in their latest chipsets. SiS currently has SATA-II on the cards as does ULi and ATI. VIA has not announced any new SATA-II support yet.

Both of our test drives were connected to the system through the ICH7-R SB and it's worth noting Seagate's current generation of SATA drives (7200.8) offer pretty good performance (as discussed here in our review of the drive earlier this year) so the Western Digital SATA-II drive will be under some pressure to perform well.

We would have liked to test in RAID 0 but unfortunately we only received one drive from Western Digital so we'll just be testing with single drives.

Let's get started!

HD Tach

Version and / or Patch Used: 3.0

Developer Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com

Product Homepage: http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public/index.php?request=HdTach /

Buy It Here

HD Tach has been around for a long time and is excellent when it comes to testing hard drive performance. It is also a very handy program when it comes to testing the controller used on particular motherboards. Tests such as Read, CPU Utilization and Burst are available at a click of the button and give you a good idea of how the hard drive can perform from system to system.

Despite a higher Host to drive transfer speed of SATA-II, it still has no real world advantage.