SATA III SSD Round-Up: OCZ, Corsair, Patriot, Crucial

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. Out testbed's motherboard was updated with the latest BIOS available as of press time and AHCI mode was enabled. The SSDs were secure erased and left blank without partitions wherever possible, unless a test required them to be partitioned and formatted, as was the case with our ATTO, PCMark 7, 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.

HotHardware Test System Intel Core i7 and SSD Powered

IOMeter I/O Subsystem Measurement Tool

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 throughput 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 didn't reveal any surprises. The OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS edition drive turned in the highest scores overall, but all of the other SandForce powered drives finished very close behind. The Marvell-based Crucial M4, however, performed significantly lower than the other drives here.

SiSoft SANDRA 2011 Synthetic HDD Benchmarking

Next we ran 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 and read and write performance metrics are detailed below.

Because SANDRA's Physical Disk benchmark shows some variation from run to run, it wouldn't really be fair to declare any drive the "winner" here. Technically, the OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS edition drive put up the best Read score and second best Write score, but all of the SandForce-based drives are closely bunched together. The Crucial M4 trailed by wide margins, however.