Testing Methods

Our storage testing hardware remains unchanged and is more than capable of putting the stress on these standard and solid state drives necessary for proper benchmarking.  We are using a Core 2 Duo E6400 processor on a Gigabyte P35 motherboard that uses the ICH9 south bridge.  The OS of choice is Windows Vista x64 SP1.  The rest of the components are listed in the table below.

Our tests are a good mix of synthetic and real-world benchmarks. 
The two PCMark suites offer a good combination of both worlds while the
IOMeter, HDTach, HDTune, Yapt and our custom File Copy test round out
the selection to cover just about all bases.  If you have any questions
about our tests just drop into the Storage Forum and we'll help you out!

Test System Setup

The new OCZ Apex 250GB SSD was tested against the best of the best in both the world of spindle-based HDDs and SSDs; it was pitted against the updated 300GB VelociRaptor 10,000 RPM hard drive as well as a RAID-0 configuration using a pair of the drives.  I also included an older 150GB Raptor X hard drive.  The opposing SSDs include the new Intel X25-M 80GB drive, an OCZ Samsung-based drive and the SuperTalent MX series 60GB drive. 

• PCMark05
• PCMark Vantage
• Yapt
• IOMeter
• HDTach
• HDTune

• PCPer File Copy Test