Our Test Methodologies: Under each test condition, the Solid State Drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a standard spinning hard disk for the OS and benchmark installations. Out testbed's motherboard was updated with the latest BIOS available as of press time and AHCI (or RAID) mode was enabled. The SSDs were secure erased and left blank without partitions wherever possible, unless a test required them to be partitioned and formatted, as was the case with our ATTO, PCMark 7, and CrystalDiskMark benchmark tests. Windows firewall, automatic updates and screen savers were all disabled before testing. In all test runs, we rebooted the system, ensured all temp and prefetch data was purged, and waited several minutes for drive activity to settle and for the system to reach an idle state before invoking a test.
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HotHardware Test System
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Intel Core i7 and SSD Powered
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Hardware Used: |
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Relevant Software: |
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Processor -
Motherboard -
Video Card -
Memory -
Audio -
Hard Drives -
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Intel Core i7-2600K
Asus P8Z6-V Pro
(Z68 Chipset, AHCI Enabled)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285
4GB Kingston DDR3-1600
Integrated on board
WD Raptor 150GB (OS Drive)
Samsung SSD 840 (250GB)
Samsung SSD 830 (256GB)
OCZ Vertex 3 (480GB)
Corsair Force GT (240GB)
Crucial M4 (256GB)
OCZ Octane (512GB)
Intel SSD 520 (240GB)
OCZ Vertex 4 (256GB & 512GB |
OS -
Chipset Drivers -
DirectX -
Video Drivers - |
Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 x64
Intel 9.2.0.1030, iRST 10.5.1027
DirectX 11
NVIDIA GeForce 275.33
Benchmarks Used:
IOMeter 1.1.0 RC
HD Tune v4.61
ATTO v2.47
AS SSD
CrystalDiskMark v3.01 x64
PCMark 7
SiSoftware Sandra 2012 |
First, we ran SiSoft SANDRA, the the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and
Reporting Assistant. Here, we used the Physical Disk test suite and
provided the results from our comparison SSDs. The benchmarks were run
without formatting and read and write performance metrics are detailed
below.
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SiSoft SANDRA 2012
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Synthetic HDD Benchmarking |
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The SANDRA Physical Disk test plays well to the Samsung 840’s read throughput, as it posted the strongest score
of the bunch. However, you can see that its overall performance is
hampered by a weak write score, which is actually the lowest score in
the whole field.
