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.

Corsair 128GB drive: 2nd from the top, trust me

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 Corsair 128GB 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 OCZ Summit, OCZ Apex,
Intel X25-M 80GB drive, an older OCZ Samsung-based drive and the SuperTalent
MX series 60GB drive. 

• PCMark Vantage
• Yapt
• PCPer File Copy Test