Testing:
Testing for this drive was done using both Vista x64 SP2 and Windows 7 RC1 (build 7100). The Windows 7 benchmarks should be taken with a grain of salt, as the operating system is not a finished product, and not all of the benchmarking suites may have 100% compatibility (as is seen later on).
- NZXT Whisper Case
- Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R Motherboard
- Intel Core i7-920
- 6GB Crucial Ballistx Tracer RAM
- Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB Drive
- Palit Radeon 4870 Sonic Dual Edition
- PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750 Watt PSU
We chose to use Windows 7 in our testing because it is supposed to be more optimized for use with SSD’s and will feature the TRIM function when it is released.
SiSoft Sandra:
SiSoft Sandra is one of our favorite benchmarks to run as it gives us an overall picture view of performance and speed. It contains tests for all types of hardware, and comes with built in sets of data for hardware against which you can compare the performance of your hardware to.
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| Vista | Windows 7 |
We can see that the drive scored a drive index of 115MB/s under Windows 7, which is negligibly better than the 114.64MB/s score by Vista. There are two important things to take away from this. The first being the insanely fast random access time of 20 microseconds. The second important thing is that the drive actually benchmarked higher than its posted read speed of 100MB/s. A drive testing higher than its posted speed is about as common as Halley’s comet flying by while there’s a blue moon in the sky. This may be attributed to having the same JMicron controller that appears in other SSD’s that are rated for higher read speeds.
