How We Examination, Organisation Specs

Forth with an array of flash drives, we've included the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.C 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM hard drive for comparison's sake. Other SSDs tested have controllers such as the SandForce SF-2281, JMicron JMF616, Intel PC29AS218A, Marvell 88SS9174, Toshiba TC58NCF618GBT and Samsung S3C29MAX01. Our testing suite consists of 4 synthetic benchmark programs and our own file copying and load time tests.

Equally you likely know, while manufacturers claim impressive peak I/O performance out of the box, this performance tin diminish over time. Dissimilar a conventional hard bulldoze, any write performance fabricated to an SSD is a 2-step process: a data block must be erased and then written to. Plainly if the bulldoze is new and unused there will be nothing to erase and therefore the first pace can be bypassed, but this simply happens once unless the drive is trimmed.

Considering this, we'll test how much performance yous can expect to lose from each SSD over fourth dimension. We'll examine all drives in their clean unused country, and and so run the HD Tach total benchmark several times to fill the entire drive. This simulates heavy usage and clearly indicates how performance will be affected afterwards normal long-term use.

All drives in this roundup support the Windows 7 TRIM function, which is meant to counteract these negative effects.

Test System Specs

  • Intel Core i7-3960X (LGA2011)
  • x4 4GB DDR3-1600 Thou.Skill (CAS 8-8-8-xx)
  • Asrock X79 Extreme11 (Intel X79)
  • OCZ ZX Serial (1250w)
  • Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.C 1TB (3Gb/south)
  • Western Digital Velociraptor 1TB (3Gb/s)
  • OCZ Vertex 4 256GB (6Gb/due south)
  • OCZ Agility 4 256GB (6Gb/south)
  • OCZ Octane 512GB (6Gb/s)
  • Kingston HyperX 3K 240GB (6Gb/s)
  • Kingston HyperX 240GB (6Gb/s)
  • Kingston SSDNow Five+200 240GB (6Gb/s)
  • Crucial m4 256GB (6Gb/s)
  • Crucial v4 256GB (3Gb/due south)
  • Intel SSD 520 Series 240GB (6Gb/s)
  • Intel SSD 510 Series 120GB (6Gb/s)
  • Intel SSD 320 Series 300GB (3Gb/s)
  • Samsung SSD 840 Pro 512GB (6Gb/s)
  • Samsung SSD 830 512GB (6Gb/s)
  • Asus GeForce GTX 680 (2048MB)

Software

  • Microsoft Windows vii Ultimate SP1 (64-bit)
  • Nvidia Forceware 306.23