Date: October 22nd, 2003.
Article by: Roger (Hardware Reviewer)
Product was donated by: Highpoint Technologies & AC Ryan

PRODUCT FEATURES & TESTING (cont'd)

As stated above, I used a brand spankin' new Maxtor 120GB 2MB cache HDD (don't tell the wife… she thinks I picked up the 40GB Maxtor).

Time to break out the benchmarks. For this testing, I used SiSoft Sandra 2004's File System benchmark and HD Tach 2.61. I used a traditional SATA cable, as well as a Vantec rounded parallel cable for speed comparison.

These were my first results with the SATA cable. You can see I've highlighted the Sandra score (34641kB/s). In HD Tach, the HDD averaged 47939kps.

Time to power down and switch the HDD to a parallel cable.

The score with the parallel cable was 31775kB/s in Sandra and 47842.6kps in HD Tach.

Now hold on a second.

We don't see a huge difference in HD Tach, but check out the difference shown in Sandra. I had expected a difference, but I have to admit that I thought it would be quite the opposite. Seems the drive was transferring data faster through the converter than through the parallel cable.

I powered down again (because I am a stubborn bastard), and reconnected the HDD to the RocketHead and the SATA channel. I ran the benchmarks again, and came up with these results.

35397kB/s in Sandra with a 1392MB/s READ versus the 1330MB/s READ off of the parallel cable. Also, it scored 47789.2kps in HD Tach this time around.

Excellent. Not only does the RocketHead allow you to add more hard drive devices to your computer, but it actually enables them to operate more efficiently. We're not talking huge gains, but every kB/s counts in my opinion.

Oh, and check out the CPU usage on the HD Tach charts. 2.8% and 3.3% versus 4.7% in favor of the HighPoint RocketHead. Will you notice the difference? Not likely. But who the hell cares… it's there.