Our Test Methodologies: Under each test condition, the hard drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with an SSD for the OS and benchmark installations. Our testbed's motherboard was updated with the latest BIOS available as of press time and AHCI (or RAID) mode was enabled. The drive 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, ensured all temp and prefetch data was purged, and waited several minutes for drive activity to settle and for the system to reach an idle state before invoking a test.
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| HotHardware Test System |
| Intel Core i7 and SSD Powered |
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Processor -
Motherboard -
Video Card -
Memory -
Audio -
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Hardware Used:
Intel Core i7-3770K
MSI Z77 MPOWER
(Z77 Chipset, AHCI Enabled)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285
4GB Kingston DDR3-1600
Integrated on board
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OS -
Chipset Drivers -
DirectX -
Video Drivers -
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Relevant Software:
Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 x64
Intel 9.2.0.1030, iRST 10.5.1027
DirectX 11
NVIDIA GeForce 275.33
Benchmarks Used:
HD Tune v4.61
ATTO v2.47
CrystalDiskMark v3.01 x64
PCMark 7
SiSoftware Sandra 2011 |
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SiSoft SANDRA 2011
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| Synthetic HDD Benchmarking |
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First, 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.
Aside from the 10,000RPM WD VelociRaptor 1TB, the WD RE 4TB drive held its own among more similarly-spec’d drives in SANDRA. Only the Seagate Barracuda 3TB drive posted better read/write scores, and even so, the two drives’ write scores were almost identical.
