Plextor VS Nec.....Weird Stuff

[HellasVagabond]

Guys im lost for words and this is why im sharing this with you.
Ive been using Plextor Drives since 1997 and never was i dissapointed.
For the past 10 months i have the Plextor DVDRW750A ( IDE ) which has done me proud.
Today i went and bought a nec labelflash drive...The NEC 7173S ( Sata ).
I did that mostly cause its nice having a labelflash drive for the fun of it
However i decided to put it up against the 750A..Since the NEC is a SATA drive i expected it to be as good or better than the 750A. Boy was i wrong.
So i did i test using the latest Nero Premium 7.9.6.0 version.
2 Different Copy Tests to decide which drive is best.
First test was using various small files which fit a 4.7GB DVD-R.
Second test was using an ISO which also fit a 4.7GB DVD-R.
In both Tests the result were :

1st TEST
PLEXTOR 750A : 7 minutes 55 seconds
NEC 7173S : 18 minutes 41 seconds

2nd TEST
PLEXTOR 750A : 8 minutes 10 seconds
NEC 7173S : 19 minutes and 23 seconds

Twice the time ? And its a SATA drive while the 750A is a IDE drive not to mention Older.
Anyways it doesnt matter to me since i only got the 7173S for the LabelFlash technology but im sure that it may be of use to others

PS : I left out that the test was made at 8x Writing Speeds since i dont consider 16x reliable enough

 

[newtekie1]

The NEC drive is most likely using a converter to convert a standard IDE drive into a SATA drive, which is probably what is causing the worse times.

Just my guess though.

Just because something is SATA doesn't mean it will be any faster, SATA hard drives aren't any faster than IDE hard drives, so why would slower optical drives benefit from the speed of SATA?

 

[HellasVagabond]

IDE HDs are slower than SATA HDs....Not much but at least 10-20% slower, check benchmarks

At least i would expect the nec to have the same times....

 

[Dippyskoodlez]

IDE HDs are slower than SATA HDs....Not much but at least 10-20% slower, check benchmarks

At least i would expect the nec to have the same times....

10% is a variable figure.

10% of 1 is .1.

Thats very little.

10% of 1 million is a lot.

10% improvement in hdd speed is normally almost unnnoticable

 

[newtekie1]

IDE HDs are slower than SATA HDs....Not much but at least 10-20% slower, check benchmarks

At least i would expect the nec to have the same times....

Really? 20% you say?

And it isn't even the SATA interface that is making the SATA drive faster, it is the 16mb buffer and the denser platters.

 

[HellasVagabond]

I said it reaches 20%
Check the burst rates, Access Times and Minimum Transfer rates. You have a 5-10% difference there on just your Benchmark.
Also check it with Sisoft Sandra.
Like i said i would AT LEAST expect the same times.

 

[newtekie1]

The burst rate is useless, it never comes into play in real life. 0.3ms is not 5-10% difference, neither is a 2MB/s minimum transfer rate. How exactly are you justifying that the minimum transfer rate is an idication of SATA performance anyway? When the bus is least saturated with data, then it is the fastest?

 

[HellasVagabond]

Latest Sysoft Sandra as you can see.
On the 1st board more is better.
2nd board less is better.
Thats where i base my findings

 

[newtekie1]

And that is supposed to prove what? An old IBM 4,200RPM Laptop Drive with 2MB Cache vs. 10,000 and 7,200 RPM Desktop Drives with 8mb cache is supposed to prove what? That IDE drives are slower? You honestly want us to take you seriously when you post things like that? How about basing it on some drives that are a little closer together?

 

[HellasVagabond]

Someone else take over

 

[Dippyskoodlez]

Someone else take over

lol, he's right.

The actual limiting factor right now isn't the interface, its how fast a hdd can physically pull information off.

Most prefer Sata simply because IDE is being phased out, is more versatile, and saves a lot of space.

 

[HellasVagabond]

We aint talking about HDDs but Optical Drives and SATA should make a difference. Even in HDDs it does, small but it does.
But like i said 100 times over i would expect it AT LEAST to have the same speed as the Plextor but it didnt. It was 100% Slower than the Plextor.

 

[wazzledoozle]

All SATA is good for is reducing cable clutter. The bandwidth available isnt going to be touched by any optical/magnetic drive available to consumers.

 

[newtekie1]

We aint talking about HDDs but Optical Drives and SATA should make a difference. Even in HDDs it does, small but it does.
But like i said 100 times over i would expect it AT LEAST to have the same speed as the Plextor but it didnt. It was 100% Slower than the Plextor.

Why should it make a difference? It doesn't make a difference in 7200RPM HDDs. 7200RPM HDDs are a much faster storage method than any Optical drive. So if a 7200RPM HDD isn't using the full bandwidth provided by SATA, and SATA makes no difference in 7200RPM HDDs, why would it make a difference in the slower Optical Drive market?

All SATA is good for is reducing cable clutter at this point. There simply aren't drives fast enough to take advantage of SATA. The 10,000RPM raptors are the only drives that MIGHT need SATA and be limitted by IDE, but even those tend to peak at about 75-90MB/s which is far below the 100MB/s given by IDE, so even they would most likely show now difference between IDE and SATA.

And I already explained to you the most likely reason it was slower. The NEC drive is an IDE drive with a SATA converter. Any time you have to send the interface through a converter it is going to slow down. SATA optical drives are only useful in reducing cable clutter, they are actually slower the majority of the time unless you pay the outragious prices for a native SATA drive, and in the end all that gets you is a drive that performs exactly the same as an IDE drive, with a smaller cable.

 

[newtekie1]

Someone else take over

No, I seriously want you to answer my questions. You are basing your argument on a 4200RPM 2MB drive vs. 7200RPM 8MB drives. Is that all your "evidence"? Oh and now that I have torn your "evidence" to pieces it suddenly isn't about hard drive, it is about optical drives. Yep, those slow optical drives should really benefit from having a faster interface.

Its like saying if you want more water to come out of your garden hose you just need to hook a fire hose up to the end of it.

 

[HellasVagabond]

Youre missing the point here.
The point is that the 750A was introduced in DECEMBER 2005 while the 7173S was introduced in DECEMBER 2006 and with almost the same price tag. Is it natural for a newer drive to perform 100% slower than a drive 1 year old ? If it was 1,2,3 minutes slower ok what the hell...But 8 minutes VS 19 minutes ??? And you think its alright ?

 

[Steevo]

I have noticed a minutes worth of recording time difference in media while running at 52X burn speeds, the drive still reports 52X was used, but different media and drive manufacturer DOES make a difference.



Native IDE against Native SATA, sata will be faster, Native IDE against a patched up SATA, SATA will be slower.


Reason, one more chip, or offloading the process to the system CPU, more time between read and write commands being executed. So the extra latentcy causes the slow down.

I will again reaffirm that you are by no way saturating the bus yet with ANY form of drive available when comparing newer models, SATA to UDMA6. I have lot of drives and lots of experiance, an the best I have seen is the 85Mbps that my 400Gb perp drive puts out. Well below UDMA6, or even UDMA5, but it is native on a SATA2 conroller.

 

[HellasVagabond]

The test was made with the SAME media in both drives.
Fuji - TDK.
Same results.
Can we leave the IDE - SATA out of this for a while and discuss the 8 vs 19 minutes ?
11 minutes difference just because it aint NATIVE SATA ???
Am i the only one who sees how weird that is ?

 

[Steevo]

Online and busy I still get 70ish as the sustained peak and only 127 as the burst, and that again means nothing.


This drive is native mode AHCI off so it is "seen" by windows as a IDE in UDMA6 mode.

 

[Steevo]

Look up the drive and see what media they recomend. The only media that I have found to work well with all drives on CD use is Maxell Pro series.



Check to see if compilation checking is off or on. If it is on for one drive and off for another it will skewer the results.

 

[newtekie1]

The test was made with the SAME media in both drives.
Fuji - TDK.
Same results.
Can we leave the IDE - SATA out of this for a while and discuss the 8 vs 19 minutes ?
11 minutes difference just because it aint NATIVE SATA ???
Am i the only one who sees how weird that is ?

I have already explained why it is slower, what more do you want to discuss? You seem to be missing the point that just because something is SATA that doesn't mean it will be faster, in this case it actually means it will be slower. Next time do your research before buying, adding an extra conversion from IDE to SATA isn't going to make the drive faster. SATA optical drives are the biggest scams out there right now.

 

[HellasVagabond]

So the SATA to IDE Conversion is responsible for 19 minutes instead of 8 ??? I cant really believe that.

 

[newtekie1]

Too bad, that is the most logical reason. The 7173S is the 7173A with a SATA converter slapped on. Most cheap SATA converters are horribly slow, something tells me NEC isn't slapping expensive SATA converters on $30 drives, I had one that would drop down into the 1MB/s transfer rate range during long transfers.

 

[HellasVagabond]

Well either way like i said i got the 7173S just for the LabelFlash function and not to burn DVDRs.....I just made this topic to warn people who intend on buying it as a primary DVDRW.

 

[ex_reven]

SATA optical drives are the biggest scams out there right now.

I wouldnt say that. IDE cables are incredibly ostentacious in any case, SATA is much easier to pull in and out, takes up less space and saves you the danger of accidently snapping IDE pins.

I do agree with you that basing performance on the bandwidth of a transmission medium/bus type is a silly thing to do however

We WISH DVDs burned at 3gb/s!