Testing:
All benchmarks were run on the system with the specifications detailed in the previous of this review, and the benchmark applications were launched from the 2TB Seagate drive listed.
For comparison purposes, the
Crucial RealSSD C300 128GB 6Gbps solid state drive will be matched up against three other solid state drives and Seagate's solid state / hard drive hybrid.
» OCZ Technology 50GB Vertex 2 Solid State Drive [
review link]
» Super Talent UltraDrive 32GB FTM32GX25H SSD [
at eWiz.com]
» OCZ Technology 60GB Agility solid state drive [
review link]
» Seagate 500GB Momentus XT hybrid drive [
review link]
Results for the Seagate Momentus XT drive are average values taken after five consecutive runs (intended to allow the hybrid drive to learn what to prioritize in the flash memory component.
The benchmarks to be executed on the four drives were pulled from the following four applications.
» PassMark Performance Test 7.0 Advanced Disk Test
» ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.41
» PCMark Vantage
» AS SSD Benchmark 1.4.3704.27281
Various tests from each of these applications were executed on each drive, and where possible the system was rebooted between each test. In addition, the drives were formatted before moving from one benchmark suite to the next.
PassMark Performance Test 7.0 Advanced Disk Test:
The PassMark's Performance Test version 7.0 (64-Bit) was the first benchmark suite used to test the 128GB RealSSD C300. While this suite offers some quick tests for drives, the data below was taken from tests found on the "Advanced" tab. For this round of tests we will see three different advanced disk tests that may simulate some real world usage, and each provides results in units of MB/s (where higher is better).
The first test is called "Database", and it uses a 90/10 split of reads/writes, where 90% of the transactions are random. You won't see a drive hitting its maximum rated specifications in any of these tests, but you will see a good gauge of potential real world results. What we see in this first chart is that the 128GB RealSSD C300 puts up a speed that is over 2.6 times faster than the next fastest drive (which was the fastest drive I had used prior to this review).
The second test, called "File Server", uses a 80/20 split of reads/writes, where 100% of the transactions are random. The RealSSD C300 still dominates the field, but this time it is only a shade over 1.6 times faster than the next drive. As the amount of writing activity increases, the dominance of the RealSSD C300 decreases since its specifications are most impressive on the read side of things.
The third test in this section is called "Work Station", and it is a 70/30 split of reads/writes, where 80% of the transactions are random. Proving my correlation of increasing writing activity decreasing the RealSSD relative performance, here we see it get beaten by the OCZ Technology Vertex 2 by a factor of 1.6. The OCZ Technology drive has a maximum write speed of 275MB/s, so it is almost 100% faster on paper.
