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

We are certainly getting a nice assortment of solid state drives for performance comparisons - the new Vertex SSD we are testing today will go against quite a few of OCZ's other options including the original SATA 3.0 Gb/s 64GB drive, the Summit 250GB and the Apex 250GB SSD.  We of course will continue to pit these drives against the Intel X25-M 80GB SSD and the fastest standard spindle-based hard drive, the Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB.

• PCMark05
• PCMark Vantage
• Yapt
• ATTO Disk Benchmark
  
• IOMeter
• HDTach
• HDTune

• PCPer File Copy Test