Testing (continued):

HD Tune Pro 3.50:

HD Tune Pro lets you conduct a quick assessment of the performance of just about any hard drive or SSD. Higher results are better for average, minimum, maximum, and burst speeds, while lower scores are better for access time.



In the chart above we again see that the read speed peaks at over 200MB/s and that the access time is not the strong suite of this drive. The burst speed of just 20MB/s is puzzling and quite low, and despite numerous re-executions of this test the value never changed.

Windows 7 Pro Boot Time:

For this final test we moved from a desktop system to a notebook in order to have a minimal installation of Windows 7 Pro that could boot from each SSD. While there is plenty of room on the Imation drive, the 32GB Super Talent drive and the 40GB Kingston drive are just too small to clone one of my typical boot drives to.

With a fresh install of Windows 7 Pro occupying just about 15GB, the upgrade kit was used to clone every drive to be exactly the same. Each system was booted twice prior to testing to make sure Windows could identify each drive properly and install any necessary drivers. After this, the system was powered up three times while a stop watch was used to time the process, and in the end an average time was recorded. The stop watch was started as soon as the power button was pressed to turn the system on, and it was stopped as soon as the swirly graphic disappeared from the mouse pointer on the Windows desktop. This measurement of boot time does include the BIOS post time, which obviously adds the same amount of time to each round of tests.



What we see is that the Imation drive is about 2-3 seconds slower than the other SSDs, but still quite fast, especially when compared to the traditional hard drive that used to run this laptop system.