Performance Testing Part One: Empty
Performance testing will be done in two parts, part one is with a bare drive (and pink window borders), part two is with Windows 7 Ultimate 64Bit installed on it (and blue window borders).
The other hardware used is as follows:
| CPU: | Intel Core i7 3770k |
| Motherboard: | ASRock Z77 Professional |
| RAM: | G.Skill RipjawsX 2133MHz |
| GPU: | MSI Radeon HD6970 |
| PSU: | OCZ Fatal1ty 1000w |
| Storage |
OCZ Vertex 3 240GB MaxIOPS OCZ Vertex 3 3.5″ 120GB |
| CPU Cooler: | Thermaltake Frio Extreme |
| Case: | Thermaltake Armor Revo |
The Vertex 3 240GB MaxIOPS is used as a boot drive for running the empty tests. For benchmarks I’ll be using the following:
- ATTO at default settings.
- ATTO with a queue depth of 10.
- AS SSD.
- CrystalDiskMark.
- Futuremark PCMark05’s XP Startup test.
PCMark05 is really only of interest to benchers these days, but being one myself and knowing that they read my reviews I’m including it. Unlike the other tests here it is by and large relevant only to itself, its application to general use is dubious at best.
We’ll start with ATTO.
ATTO at Defaults
Theoretical rating has been well broken, this is a quick drive! I like to try a queue depth of 10 as well to see how drives will deal with really heavy workloads. Most don’t appreciate it much, the exception being OCZ’s RevoDrive3 which about doubles performance at low and mid range file sizes.
ATTO at Queue10
So much for being standard! This drive shares the RevoDrive3’s love of deep queues. The low file size performance is far higher with the high queue depth. It makes me wonder if there’s some Revodrive3 knowledge lurking in this thing somewhere.
AS SSD
Not bad at all! It’s easily the fastest 120GB SATA SSD we’ve tested here at funkykit, and managed nearly the scores of the RevoDrive3 120GB in this test!
CrytalDiskMark
It’s not just faster than other 120GB drives in this test. Oh no, it stomps them into the ground and laughs at them. This is serious performance.
PCMark05
It stomps here, too! With PC05 I noticed that this drive does a lot of caching. The first run was in the 240MB/s range, the second run is the one above, the third was >280MB/s. We’ll see how it does once it have Windows on board taking up space.
