Four-Way SSD Round-Up, OCZ, Super Talent, Mtron
PCMark Vantage HDD Test
Next up is PCMark Vantage from FutureMark Corp. We specifically used only the HDD Test module of this benchmark suite to evaluate all the drives we tested. Feel free to consult Futuremark's white paper on PCMark Vantage for an understanding of what each test component entails and how it calculates its measurements. For specific information on how the HDD Test module arrives at its performance measurements, we'd encourage you to read pages 35 and 36 of the white paper.
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The obvious first take-away here is that all of our SSDs completely eclipse the WD VelociRaptor in all of these tests. This is largely due to the SSD drive's lighting fast sub-millisecond random access and seek times that are orders of magnitude faster than any spinning disk. And let's face it, the average end user desktop experience is combination of a lot of random read/write operations, with a heavier emphasis on reads. The average SSD score here offers two to three times the throughput of the 10K RPM VelociRaptor, in terms of Windows Vista start-up performance. From there, the rest is self-explanatory. Overall, the lower cost MLC-based OCZ Core Series and Super Talent MasterDrive MX offered highly competitive performance versus their Cadillac-priced SLC cousins.
