Intel SSD 510 Series SATA 6Gbps Solid State Drive
Test Setup and IOMeter 1.1 RC
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. 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 i7-2600K Asus P8P67 Deluxe (P67 Chipset) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 4GB Patriot DDR3-1600 Integrated on board WD Raptor 150GB (OS Drive) Intel SSD 510 Series (250GB) x 2 OCZ Vertex 3 (240GB) OCZ Vertex 2 (120GB) Corsair Performance 3 Series (128GB) Intel X25-M G2 (160GB) |
OS - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Video Drivers - |
Relevant Software: Windows 7 Ultimate x64 Intel 9.2.0.1021, iRST 10.1.0.1008 DirectX 11 NVIDIA GeForce 266.58 Benchmarks Used: IOMeter 1.1.0 RC HD Tach v3 ATTO v2.46 CrystalDiskMark v3.01 x64 PCMark Vantage SiSoftware Sandra 2011 |
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As we've noted in previous SSD articles, though IOMeter is clearly a well-respected industry standard drive benchmark, we're not completely comfortable with it for testing SSDs. The fact of the matter is, though our actual results with IOMeter appear to scale properly, it is debatable whether or not certain access patterns, as they are presented to and measured on an SSD, actually provide a valid example of real-world performance for the average end user. That said, we do think IOMeter is a gauge for relative available bandwidth and response times with a given storage solution. In addition there are certain higher-end workloads you can place on a drive with IOMeter, that you really can't with most other benchmark tools available currently.
In the following tables, we're showing two sets of access patterns; our Workstation pattern, with an 8K transfer size, 80% reads (20% writes) and 80% random (20% sequential) access and IOMeter's default access pattern of 2K transfers, 67% reads (34% writes) and 100% random access.
Our IOMeter results have the Intel 510 Series SSDs outperforming the 128GB Corsair Performance 3 drive which uses a similar controller; the deltas can likely be attributed to differences in firmware and the higher capacity of the Intel drives. Moving to a two drive RAID 0 setup improves performance here by about 40%. What's most interesting to note, however, is that previous-gen SandForce and Intel drives outperform the 510 SSD Series in random writes, and the upcoming SF-2000 based Vertex 3 is simply in another league.
