Computing on Demand PC News & Reviews
All benchmarks are run a minimum of 5 times and the results are averaged. We reboot our bench system between each run and defragment our hard drive if necessary before running the benchmark.
| Motherboard | Gigabyte 880GA-UD3H |
| Processor | AMD Phenom II X4 965 |
| Memory | 2x4GB Kingston HyperX DDR3 |
| Hard Drive | Crucial M4 SSD 128GB |
| Chassis | Lian Li PC-6 |
| Power Supply | BFG LS-450 |
| Operating System | Windows 7 Professional 64-bit |
| NIC | 2 x Intel Gigabit CT Adapters (Teaming – IEEE 802.3ad) |
| Network Switch | Netgear GS716Tv2 |
AS SSD
AS SSD is a small but powerful SSD benchmarking utility created specifically for that purpose. The software uses “incompressible” data to benchmark your drive without the benefits of compression that may increase performance under certain circumstances.
CrystalDiskMark
CrystalDiskMark is another benchmarking utility that determines speeds by measuring 512KB, 4KB, and 4KB (Queue Depth 32) sequential and random read and write speeds. Test data can be Random, 0Fill, and 1Fill. For our purposes, we left the test at Random.
Anvil Storage Benchmark
Anvil Storage Benchmark is a software package that I strolled across one day while cruising some reviews. The software is still in BETA and offers it out to you for free during the BETA period. The software has an SSD benchmark that can be configured to test with data from 0Fill to 1Fill. You get read write speeds in MB/s and IOPS. There are other benchmarking options, but we are only concerned with the SSD benchmarking at 0Fill and 100% (1Fill – Incompressible).
IOMeter
IOMeter has to be one of the most widely used software packages for benchmarking disks. There are an endless number of ways you can build a benchmark, but we chose to limit our benchmarking to 100 percent Sequential Read and Write then 100 percent Random Read and Write. You can emulate our benchmarking by using the following configuration
| ‘size | % of size | % reads | % writes | % sequential | % random | delay | burst | align | reply |
| 2,097,152 | 100 | 100 | 0 | 100 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| 2,097,152 | 100 | 0 | 100 | 100 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| 2,097,152 | 100 | 100 | 0 | 0 | 100 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| 2,097,152 | 100 | 0 | 100 | 0 | 100 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
PCMark Vantage
PCMark Vantage is a benchmarking suite designed to stress components in various ways to measure performance. For our purposes, we will be utilizing the HDD Suite to gain an understanding on how this drive will perform under these simulated criteria: Windows Defender, Gaming, Importing Photos, Windows Vista Startup, Video Editing Windows Media Center, Adding Music, and Application Loading.
PCMark 8
Using traces recorded from Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office and a selection of popular games, PCMark 8 Storage highlights real-world performance differences between storage devices. You do not need to have these applications installed on your system to run the Storage benchmark. The PCMark 8 Storage benchmark test contains the following workload traces:
- Adobe Photoshop light
- Adobe Photoshop heavy
- Adobe Illustrator
- Adobe InDesign
- Adobe After Effect
- Microsoft Word
- Microsoft Excel
- Microsoft PowerPoint
- World of Warcraft
- Battlefield 3
ATTO
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.