How We Examination, Organisation Specs

Along with an assortment of flash drives, we've included the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.C 1TB 3.v" 7200RPM and Western Digital Velociraptor 1TB 10,000RPM hard drives for comparing's sake. Other SSDs tested take controllers such every bit the SandForce SF-2281, JMicron JMF616, Intel PC29AS218A, Marvell 88SS9174, Toshiba TC58NCF618GBT and Samsung S3C29MAX01. Our testing suite consists of iv constructed benchmark programs and our own file copying and load time tests.

As you probable know, while manufacturers claim impressive peak I/O performance out of the box, this performance can diminish over time. Unlike a conventional hard bulldoze, any write operation made to an SSD is a two-step process: a data block must be erased and so written to. Plainly if the bulldoze is new and unused there will be nothing to erase and therefore the commencement step can be bypassed, simply this only happens once unless the drive is trimmed.

Because this, we'll examination how much performance you tin expect to lose from each SSD over time. We'll examine all drives in their clean unused state, and so run the Hard disk Tach full benchmark several times to fill the entire drive. This simulates heavy usage and conspicuously indicates how performance volition be affected after normal long-term use.

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

Examination System Specs

  • Intel Core i7-2600K (LGA1155)
  • x2 4GB DDR3-1600 G.Skill (CAS 8-8-viii-20)
  • Asus P8P67 Deluxe (Intel P67)
  • OCZ ZX Series (1250w)
  • Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.C 1TB (3Gb/s)
  • Western Digital Velociraptor 1TB (3Gb/s)
  • OCZ Vector 256GB (6Gb/s)
  • OCZ Vertex iv 256GB (6Gb/s)
  • OCZ Agility iv 256GB (6Gb/s)
  • OCZ Octane 512GB (6Gb/southward)
  • Kingston HyperX 3K 240GB (6Gb/southward)
  • Kingston HyperX 240GB (6Gb/s)
  • Kingston SSDNow V+200 240GB (6Gb/due south)
  • Crucial m4 256GB (6Gb/s)
  • Crucial v4 256GB (3Gb/s)
  • Intel SSD 520 Series 240GB (6Gb/s)
  • Intel SSD 510 Serial 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 580 (1536MB)

Software

  • Microsoft Windows vii Ultimate SP1 (64-bit)
  • Nvidia Forceware 310.61