Micron RealSSD P320h PCI Express SSD Review

Our Test Methodologies:  Under each test condition, the SSDs tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a standard spinning hard disk for the OS and benchmark software 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, CrystalDiskMark benchmark tests, as well as IOMeter runs. 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.

** Please also note that the Micron P320h card was configured in high performance mode, for maximum read/write performance, though lower power modes are also available.

HotHardware Test System Intel Core i7 and SSD Powered

SiSoft SANDRA 2012 Synthetic HDD Benchmarking

For our first set of tests, we used SiSoft SANDRA, the the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. Here, we used the Physical Disk test suite and provided the results from our comparison SSDs. The benchmarks were run without formatting on all drives and read and write performance metrics are detailed below.

SANDRA's purely sequential and rather short read/write workloads in this test favor the Micron P320h and it turns in a first place finish by a comfortable margin.  Note that the drive tends to offer higher read throughput and here we're not seeing quite the top-end of Micron's specification in that area.  Also note that the Intel SSD 910 requires software OS-level RAID for it to realize its peak performance, and since the SANDRA Physical Disk test module runs on bare, unformatted volumes, the Intel drive is operating on only one of its for 200GiB NAND modules.

SANDRA's File System benchmark exhibits combined Read/Write throughput on blank, formatted volumes .

Here we see a much tighter grouping in the field and though we weren't able to re-test the OCZ Z-Drive R4 since we no longer have it in the lab, the Micron P320h shows best of class performance here as well versus its primary competitors.  Sequential Read bandwidth was 2.29GB/s and Sequential Writes came in at 1.84GB/s for a total of 2.19GB/s in SANDRA's "drive score" rating.