We like PCMark 7's Secondary Storage benchmark module for its pseudo real-world application measurement approach to testing. PCMark 7 offers a trace-based measurement of system response times under various scripted workloads of traditional client / desktop system operation. From simple application start-up performance, to data streaming from a drive in a game engine, and video editing with Windows Movie Maker, we feel more comfortable that these tests reasonably illustrate the performance profile of SSDs in an end-user / consumer PC usage model, more so than a purely synthetic transfer test.
 | | Futuremark PCMark 7 Secondary Storage Test | | Trace-based Storage Workloads |
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The Samsung Portable SSD T3 posted a very strong PCMark score for an external drive, though it trailed the SATA-based drives overall. If you dig into the individual test results in the top chart, however, you'll see that the T3 was competitive in almost every test and faltered only in the 'Starting Applications' portion of the benchmark.
