7-Way SSD Round-Up: Sandforce vs. JMicron
Test System and IOMeter
Our Test Methodologies: Under each test condition, the Solid State Drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a standard spinning hard disk for the OS and benchmark installations. The SSDs were left blank without partitions wherever possible, unless a test required them to be partitioned and formatted, as was the case with our ATTO, Vantage, and CrystalDiskMark benchmark tests. And all drives were secure erased prior to the start of any testing. Windows firewall, automatic updates and screen savers were all disabled before testing. In all test runs, we rebooted the system and waited several minutes for drive activity to settle before invoking a test.
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Motherboard - Video Card - Memory - Audio - Hard Drives -
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Hardware Used: Intel Core i7 965 Gigabyte GA-EX58-Extreme (X58 Express Chipset) GeForce GTX 280 6144MB Corsair DDR3-1333 CAS 7 Integrated on board OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 100GB OCZ Vertex 2 100GB OCZ Agility 2 100GB Corsair Force 100GB Patriot Memory Zephyr 128GB |
OS - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Video Drivers - |
Relevant Software: Windows 7 Ultimate Intel 9.1.1.1025 w/ Matrix Storage DirectX 11 NVIDIA ForceWare v196.34 Benchmarks Used: HD Tach v3.0.1.0 ATTO v2.46 CrystalDiskMark v3 PCMark Vantage SiSoftware Sandra 2010 SP1 |
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In the following tables, we're showing two sets of access patterns with IOMeter; one with an 8K transfer size, 80% reads (20% writes) and 80% random (20% sequential) access and one with IOMeter's default access pattern of 2K transfers, 67% reads and 100% random access. Both tests were conducted with 8 worker threades.
Our IOMeter testing shows a huge disparity in performance between the JMicron based Patriot Zephyr and SandForce based drives. The Zephyr offers only a fraction of the performance of the other drives with the access patterns we used with IOMeter. The SandForce based drives, however, were tightly grouped, with the OCZ Vertex 2 100GB technically coming out on top by the slightest of margins.
The updated 120GB Sandforce drives perform somewhat lower than their 100GB counterparts, however.
