[TriLUG] Interested in SATA HD Timings

[Scott Chilcote]

Hi Folks,

While I realize that hdparm -t is not a perfect test of hard drive 
performance, I'm interested in seeing what people are getting for SATA 
drives as compared to other IDE and SCSI drives.

I'm currently using an IDE Ultra ATA/100 7500 RPM hard drive, and two 
SCSI Ultra 160 10,000 RPM drives on an Athlon XP 2100 system at home.
hdparm -t reports about 40 MB/s on the IDE, and about 80 MB/s on the 
SCSI drives.

I realize that a faster machine will get faster read times.  I tried 
timing a nearly identical ATA/100 drive on a Xeon 2.2 GHz system, and it 
reported 50 MB/s.  This machine also had an  older IDE Ultra ATA/66 5400 
RPM drive, and it reported 20 MB/s.

So, given that these comparisons are imperfect, would anyone be willing 
to share what timings their SATA drives are reporting?  If you have a 
substantially faster or slower processor than those I've listed, it 
would be useful to know.

Before I get a half dozen replies mentioning Tom's Hardware, yes, I plan 
to read their site (among others) before shelling out for new drives.  I 
find other users' experiences to be at least as valuable though.

Thanks,

--
Scott C.