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

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

All of the SSDs leave the HDD far behind in this benchmark. The SSDNow V200 is slower in this test than the HyperX enthusiast SSDs overall whereas the SSDNow V300 is the very fastest in Read speeds but slower than V200 in Writes.  The OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G 240GB SSD matches the fastest Kingston SSDs in Read speeds but takes a real lead in the Write speeds.

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 OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G 240GB SSD result:

From looking at the chart, what is impressive is the performance in HD Tach of our HDD.

The OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G 240GB SSD once again leads in this synthetic benchmark.

HD Tune 2.55

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

Now the chart.

There is absolutely no comparison in these synthetic tests. All SSDs are much faster than the mechanical HDD but the performance of the Kingston HyperX drive simply blow away the SSDNow V200’s transfer rate performance in this test.   In contrast, the SSDNow V300’s rate is quite respectable even compared to the much more expensive Hyper-X drives.   The OWC is the second-fastest SSD in this test, but only by about 0.10%

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.

Here is the chart comparing the scores:

As in most of our tests, the SSDs leaves the HDD trailing far behind in this benchmark and the OWC SSD is fastest; and together with the HyperX SSDs, are significantly faster than the SSDNow V200 and V300.

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 is the SSDNow V300 SSD’s results:We are way ahead of Kingston’s published conservative figures of 450MB/s for Read and Write!

Here are the results of the HDD benchmark.

Here is the results of the ATTO Disk benchmark results for our 128GB VNow 200 SSD: V200 is quite a bit slower than the V3oo

Here is the Hyper3K SSD Here are the HyperX SSD results:

Notice that the OWC SSD is really fast like the HyperX SSDs in Read, but in this test is even faster in Write.

It doesn’t really prove anything (yet), 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 until the SSDNow V300 series where the consumer-grade SSD comes close to the HyperX enthusiast SSDs in performance. 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.