Shootouts

Gone in a Flash - 5 Solid State Drives Compared

By Vincent Chang & Vijay Anand - 23 Jul 2009

Results - PCMark Vantage

Results - PCMark Vantage

We used PCMark Vantage to find out how these hard drives fared in real-world scenarios by focusing on the hard drive test suite. These tests range from gaming performance, to loading applications and media creation performance - all in all, testing a mix of read/write performance whose blend varies in each of the test scenarios. The overall score had the Kingston leading once again, with the Intel X25-M posting similar scores to the OCZ Vertex and Patriot Torqx. Mtron's SSD continued to lag behind the rest, though it's still very much ahead of the WD hard drives.

While the tests and results varied, the four SSDs (Intel, Kingston, OCZ and Patriot) were generally in the same ballpark when it comes to their performance. The Intel X25-M excelled for certain sections like importing pictures and startup time (both of which stresses the read performance) but faltered in the media related sections like Windows Movie Maker, which is to be expected since it tasks write performance of the SSD. This was not experienced by the Kingston E-Series since its specs allow it to excel a whole lot better for write performance.

The two SSD drives using the Indilinx controllers produced a very balanced performance and though they only emerged tops in the Windows Media Center test, their overall performance was commendable (with OCZ coming out a tad better). The only blemish here was the application loading test, where they were significantly slower than the Intel-based SSD drives that generally fare better on all of the read-oriented tests.

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