Crucial M550 Series Solid State Drive Review

Next we ran SiSoft SANDRA 2014, the the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. Here, we used the Physical Disk test suite and provide the results from our comparison SSDs. The benchmarks were run on unformatted drives and read and write performance metrics are detailed below.

SiSoft SANDRA 2014 Synthetic HDD Benchmarking

The Crucial M550 put up some of the best read and write scores we've seen in the SiSoft SANDRA physical disk benchmark.

ATTO Disk Benchmark More Information Here: http://bit.ly/btuV6w

ATTO is another "quick and dirty" type of disk benchmark that measures transfer speeds across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and graphs them out in an easily interpreted chart. We chose .5kb through 8192kb transfer sizes and a queue depth of 6 over a total max volume length of 256MB. ATTO's workloads are sequential in nature and measure raw bandwidth, rather than I/O response time, access latency, etc.

All of the drives we tested offered competitive performance in the ATTO Disk Benchmark, though the M550 drives put up some of the better write scores of the group with block sizes ranging from 4K - 64K.