Lab test: 8 ATA / S-ATA 7200 RPM hard drives
by Marc Prieur
Published on October 16, 2003
Cache transfer rate
None of the hard drives were able to sustain 100 MB /s. To get close to this limit two discs had to be used simultaneously. The contribution of the Serial ATA and its 150 MB/s was only to transmission speed of information included in the hard drive. We measured the cache debit rate on the following hard drives:
The only two hard drives able to reach over 100 MB/s were the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 and Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 (the ICH5 is restricted to ATA 100 and isn’t compatible with the ATA133). For Western and Seagate the transfer rate was equivalent in SATA and ATA. This was disappointing.
