ATTO Disk Benchmark:
ATTO Disk Benchmark is a popular and free program used to measure transfer rates across specified lengths. The bandwidth results here are not necessarily entirely reliable for reporting the maximum drive speeds, but it does help convey results of the bandwidth for different file sizes, so it’s best to view ATTO in the context of throughput or IOPS (Input/Output Operations per Second) performance.
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| Vista | Windows 7 |
Once again Windows 7 is able to beat out the Vista installation. This is definitely due to the optimizations that Microsoft has done for overall disk I/O and probably attributed to some SSD optimizations as well.
CrystalDiskMark 2.1:
CrystalDiskMark was used to test the read and write speeds of different file sizes . The results are as follows:
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| 50MB test (Vista) | 50MB test (Windows 7) |
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| 100MB test (Vista) | 100MB test (Windows 7) |
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| 500MB test (Vista) | 500MB test (Windows 7) |
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| 1000MB test (Vista) | 1000MB test (Windows 7) |
Looking at the results, it appears that CrystalDiskMark predominantly favors Windows 7 for disk reads and Vista for disk writes. CrystalDiskMark, like ATTO Bench, is a better indicator of throughput than max transfer speeds. This is where Kingston has made significant improvements with their custom firmware. Their special firmware and cache increase has allowed them to increase their performance for smaller files at the expense of decreased maximum transfer speed. Small files are the majority of what an operating system transfers during normal operations and lends greatly to the sense of “speed” of the drive that a user experiences. The SSDNow V Series has higher transfer speeds on the smaller data files than other drives with the same controller. The sudden drop off in performance on the 1000MB test is likely due to a limitation of the JMicron controller.
