Serial ATA performance — continued

HD Tach
We used HD Tach 3.01's 8MB zone test to measure basic SATA throughput and latency.

Disk controllers that support Native Command Queuing tend to perform better in HD Tach's sustained write speed test, which explains the GeForce's huge lead there. Otherwise, disk performance is pretty close.

HD Tach access times are too close to call, and the CPU utilization results are well within the application's +/- 2% margin of error for that test.

USB performance
Our USB transfer speed tests were conducted with a USB 2.0/Firewire external hard drive enclosure connected to a 7200RPM Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 hard drive. We tested with HD Tach 3.01's 8MB zone setting.

USB performance has always been a weakness of AMD chipsets, so it's no surprise to see the GeForce out in front here. The 8300 is faster across the board, and it has a particularly impressive lead in the read speed tests.