Serial ATA performance — continued

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

HD Tach doesn't hammer drives with multiple I/O requests, which suits the 780G just fine. Burst and read speeds are pretty close between the 780G and G35, with the latter pulling out ahead in the average write speed test. The write speed test is an interesting anomaly, since we've seen numerous chipsets that correctly support Native Command Queuing exhibit performance similar to the G35's with our Raptor hard drive.

The 780G is a hair quicker than the G35 in HD Tach's random access time test. We're talking tenths of a millisecond here, so make that a fraction of a hair.

CPU utilization results are within HD Tach's margin of error in this test.