SATA converters!!!

[Ribbit]

Originally posted by Paulr
It may be interesting to note that a Segate SATA drive reviewed in this months PC Pro magazine (UK) was performing slower than it's PATA equivalent.

Storagereview said the same thing - the SATA drive's seek time is slightly slower than the PATA equivalent. Weird, considering that they are probably the same drive mechanically.

[Nowhere]

could it possibly be that serial nature of new interface ads latency?

[Paulr]

What I was expecting to see was that the SATA drives would be performing no faster than the PATA drives.
The fact that SATA is not yet integrated into the Southbridge and instead is routed through PCI meant that in theory SATA was no faster of better than the wonderfully marketed ATA133.
What I certainly did not expect to see was an actual reduction in performance.
I really don't know if it is the interface at the HD level or the SATA controller.
I have a WD1200JB attached to a Silicon Image SATA controller and benchmarks would inidicate that it is running as it should be (with a lower CPU overhead).
That would seem to indicate that what ever is lowering the performance of the SATA drives is actually on the drive side of things.

[Kurt]

AFAIK the SATA "controllers" are just really bridges from SATA to the onboard ATA controller. it's probably just overhead that's killing performance...