AMUG SATA Drive Review and Tests

I have sung AMUG's praises before and once again they do a truly thorough review of some SATA drives. They compare a 320GB SATA drive from Seagate and HItachi with a 300GB Maxtor drive in a number of different setups. The interesting results are that some of these drives can run much slower when hooked up internally to a Mac Pro. Here's their bite on it:

"As the Seagate 320GB and the Hitachi T7K500 320GB both have performance issues with the internal Mac Pro SATA bus, it seems that the Mac Pro is fussy about which hard drives will perform well when mounted on the internal SATA bus."

So in their tests, the Maxtor Maxline III read at an average speed of 56.5 MB/s, but the Hitachi T7K500 only read at 41.1 MB/s when both were installed inside a Mac Pro. The Maxtor's average write speed was 55.7 MB/s, but the Seagate 7200.10 only managed to write at 39.9 MB/s inside a Mac Pro. (Apparently, the other size drives in Seagate's 7200.10 series don't have that problem with write speeds, according to AMUG.)

However, when working with a Sonnet Tempo PCI-E SATA host card, the performance of these drives was very similar. In fact, I just emailed Firmtek yesterday about what 500GB drive to hook up with their Seritek 1VE4 Host Adapter. They recommended a Hitachi T7K500. So while I wouldn't put that drive in a Mac Pro, I plan to follow Firmtek's advice on getting the Hitachi.