Kingston’s HyperX and VNow 200 SSDs turn up the heat on the Hard Disk Drive

PCMark Vantage

PCMark Vantage is a PC benchmark suite designed for Windows Vista and 7 that offers one-click simplicity for casual users and detailed, professional grade testing for industry, press and enthusiasts. A PCMark Vantage score is a rough measure of your computer’s performance across a variety of common tasks. The measurement for the PCMark Vantage hard drive suite is the total score with the scoring for each test further broken down. There are a total of eight hard drive tests within PCMark Vantage and all eight are run to measure the relative performance of the SSD vs the HDD we tested.

The HDD Test suite in PCMark Vantage consists of the following 8 tests and we are going to be paying particular attention to the disk drive tests:

• HDD 1- Windows Defender
• HDD 2- Game HDD
• HDD 3- Importing pictures
• HDD 4- Windows Vista start-up
• HDD 5- Video editing
• HDD 6- Media Center
• HDD 7- Adding music to Windows Media Player
• HDD 8- Application loading

First we run the standard PCMark Vantage benchmark suite using our Seagate 500GB 7200.12 hard drive paying attention to the HDD test suite.

Now we run the same benchmark suite with our Kingston SSDNow V200.

Next up is the HyperX 3K SSD:

Finally we run the same benchmark suite with our 240GB Kingston HyperX SSD.

In all cases, the SSDs are faster with PCMark Vantage than with the mechanical hard disk drives and the HyperX drives are faster for some applications than the SSD VNow series.

We also see from the chart above that the kind of drive used in the benchmarking will affect the final score of most benchmark suites but we have to look at the actual drive test to see big differences between SSD performance.

PC Mark 7

PCMark 7 is Futuremark’s updated verion of our last benchmark suite but for Windows 7. Just as the overall score is affected by the drive used in Vantage, the same applies to PCMark 7. The standard version of the suite does not give a breakdown score for the SSD/HDD tests. Here is the overall chart.

As in all synthetic suites, the overall score depend a great deal on the drive used. However, there is not a lot of difference in the scores between a consumer SSD and a high-performance enthusiast drive running the entire benchmark suite.

SANDRA 2010 SP1

SANDRA, short for the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant is an information and diagnostic utility. It provides a tremendous amount of information about every hardware and software component in your PC. It also provides various benchmarks including for measuring and reporting disk performance. Although we used the last verson of 2011, SANDRA 2012 came out last week and it is an incredibly useful suite which we also use regularly as a diagnostic utility.

Here is a summary chart of SANDRA’s benchmarks that we ran:

As usual, both SSDs are significantly faster that the HDD for synthetic benchmarking when benching physical disks and file systems; very little else is affected.  We do see huge differences between the HDD and the SSDs and also that the HyperX SSDs are faster than the VNow 200 series.  Let’s head for real world testing.