Shootouts

Gone in a Flash - 5 Solid State Drives Compared

By Vincent Chang & Vijay Anand - 23 Jul 2009

Results - HD Tune Pro 3.5

Results - HD Tune Pro 3.5

HD Tune Pro 3.5 was another benchmark to give a glimpse of the read and write performance of these SSD drives, which as one can see here, are generally superior to mechanical hard drives for reads. When it comes to write performance, only the Kingston SSD maintained top performance, no doubt due to its SLC flash memory design and Intel's controller. Once again, we have to highlight the Mtron, which had very similar and consistent read and write results, loses out to the others with its slower read performance.

OCZ's Vertex had a rather wide spectrum of results for its write performance, ranging from a minimum of 18.5MB/s to a maximum of 79.8MB/s. This was quite unexpected since the similarly designed Patriot Torqx had a more consistent performance. We double checked these results even on a different system altogether and they don't vary. That aside, the mechanical hard drives also proved to measure up in terms of write performance.

Moving on to the random read/write performance, the Intel and Kingston dominated the read section, with significantly higher I/O operations per second (IOPs) than the others. Here was also where the mechanical hard drives were clearly out of their league. The OCZ Vertex however was surprisingly bad when it came to random writes, much more so than the Patriot Torqx, which was leading the pack. This scenario is quite similar to the above set of tests.

The reason boiled down to its random access performance, which is the next set of results. For writes, the Vertex and to a lesser extent, the Mtron was slow, even slower than the WD hard drives. Meanwhile, the Torqx had the best random access result here, even beating the Intel-based drives, suggesting a better tuned drive.

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