Synthetic Tests

CrystalDiskMark

Crystal DiskMark version 3.0 is an excellent way to test your motherboard/HD’s performance. CrystalDiskMark is primarily a HDD benchmark utility for your hard drive that enables you to measure sequential data and random read/write speeds in 4k blocks and 512k blocks.

Here are two key features of “CrystalDiskMark”:

· Sequential reads/writes

· Random 4KB/512KB reads/writes

First we test with our 500GB Seagate 7200.12 mechanical hard drive and we see very decent performance.

Now we move on to the 128GB VNow 200 SSD for more than double the performance!

Now the 3K SSD which is as much a difference over the Vnow 200 SSD as the consumer series SSD is faster than the HDD.

Finally the HyperX SSD receives basically the same score as the 3K SSD; slightly less but well within the benchmark’s margin of error.

And now we put the sequential read/write information into a comparison chart:

All the SSDs leave the HDD far behind in this benchmark. The VNow 200 SSD is slower in this test than the HyperX enthusiast SSDs

HD TACH

HD Tach v3.0.4.0 is a hard drive benchmark utility which will measure the average read speed, the random access time, and the CPU utilization. Here is the VNow 200 128GB SSD result:

From looking at the chart, what is impressive is the performance in HD Tach of our HDD. First we look the HDD’s sequential read speed test is graphed along with the random access time and CPU utilization – average read is 110.5 MB/s, which we shall see is less than half that of the SSD: at the sequential read speed of the 128 GB SSD is graphed along with the random access time and CPU utilization – average read is 223.5 MB/s.

The VNow 200 128 GB SSD scores surprisingly weak compared to the HDD in this test. In contrast, both HyperX SSDs score far higher

HD Tune 2.55

HD Tune is a hard disk utility. We are using the default setting of 64KB blocks for testing. First we run the standard benchmark with the all of our four drives.

The only thing to note is that the 3K edition is faster in the averages than the 5K version. From looking at the tests, the more expensive SSD has a higher burst rate and higher average transfer rate; it falls short in the minimum where it appears to drop off suddenly in one place that lowers its average.

There is absolutely no comparison in these synthetic tests. All SSDs are much faster than the mechanical HDD but the performance Kingston HyperX simply blow away the VNow 200 SSD’s transfer rate performance in this test.

ASSD

ASSD is designed primarily for Solid-State Drives. There are four synthetic and three practice tests. The synthetic tests determine the sequential and random read and write performance of the SSD and are carried out without use of the operating system caches. In Seq-test the program measures how long it takes to read and write a 1 GB file respectively. In the 4K test the read and write performance for random 4K blocks is determined. The 4K-64-thrd test corresponds to the 4K procedure except that the read and write operations on 64 threads are distributed as with the usual start of a program.

In the copying test following folders are created: ISO (two large files), programs (typical program folder with many small files) and games (folder of a game with small and large files). These three folders are copied with a simple copy command of the operating system. The cache is turned on for this test. The practice tests show the performance of the SSD with simultaneous read and write operations.

First up is the HDD:

Next is the Vnow 200 SSD

Third is the HyperX 3K SSD

And finally the HyperX SSD

Here is the chart comparing the scores:

As in most of our tests, the SSDs leaves the HDD far behind in the benchmarks and the HyperX SSDs are significantly faster than the VNow 200 SSD.

ATTO

The ATTO Disk Benchmark is an aging performance measurement tool which measures storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize the performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Here are the results of the HDD benchmark.And now we show the ATTO Disk benchmark results for our 128GB VNow 200 SSD: Here is the results of our HyperX 3K SSD. And finally, here is the HyperX SSD:

It doesn’t really prove anything, but synthetic benchmarks are definitely faster on the SSD vs the HDD. We also note the continuing trend of performance differences between the consumer and the enthusiast-grade SSDs. In some areas, one is faster than the other, but we want to know practically if one is faster. Perhaps PCMark Vantage may provide a clue.