PCMark Vantage: Used Drive Performance

Immediately after finishing my PCMark Vantage runs on the previous page, I wrote one large file sequentially to the rest of the drive. I then deleted the file, rebooted and re-ran PCMark Vantage. This gives us an idea of the worst case desktop performance of these drives as you create, delete and generally just use these drives.

PCMark Vantage (Used State)

The biggest difference here is that the Samsung based OCZ Summit drops from 5th to 9th place. All of the drives get slower but the Indilinx drives hardly show it. When it comes to dealing with write speed, SLC flash does have the advantage and we see the X25-E and Vertex EX rise to the top of the pack. The G2 is slightly faster than the G1 and the Indilinx drives follow in close pursuit.

The mechanical drives don't change in performance since they don't get slower with use, only as they get more full.

PCMark Vantage (Used State) - Memories Suite

Again we see the two SLC drives at the top, this time followed by a mixture of Indilinx/Intel drives, and the Samsung based Summit is at the bottom of the pack before we get to the HDDs.

PCMark Vantage (Used State) - TV & Movies Suite

The spread in SSD performance here is only 10% between the slowest non-Samsung drive and the fastest. That tells me that we're mostly CPU bound, but the worst performers other than the Samsung drive are the two Intel X25-Ms. That part tells me that we're at least somewhat bound by sequential write speeds. Either way, the Indilinx drives have a good showing here.

PCMark Vantage (Used State) - Gaming Suite

Intel followed by Indilinx SLC with Samsung in league with the MLC Indilinx drives. This is an SSD's dream.

PCMark Vantage (Used State) - Music Suite

Despite the improvements, the G2 can't touch the much lower write latency of SLC flash here. The Indilinx and Intel G1 drives intermingle while the Samsung drive pulls up the rear. All are faster than a regular hard drive of course.

PCMark Vantage (Used State) - Communications Suite

PCMark Vantage (Used State) - Productivity Suite

In the multitasking test we once again see Intel rise to the top. The Samsung drive does surprisingly well and the Indilinx drives continue to perform admirably.

PCMark Vantage (Used State) - HDD Suite

The breakdown between SSDs here is almost linear. The X25-E leads the pack, followed by OCZ's SLC drive. The G2 and G1 are next, then a ton of Indilinx MLC drives. The slowest SSD? The Samsung based Summit of course.

Overall System Performance using PCMark Vantage Individual Application Performance
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  • tachi1247 - Friday, September 18, 2009 - link

    Does anyone know what the difference is between the 7mm thick and 9.5mm thick drives?

    http://download.intel.com/design/flash/nand/mainst...">http://download.intel.com/design/flash/nand/mainst...

    They seem to be identical except for the drive thickness.
  • dszc - Saturday, September 12, 2009 - link

    FANTASTIC series of articles. Kudos! They go a long way toward satisfying my intellectual curiosity.

    But now it is time to reap the rewards of this technology and earn a living.
    So I need some real-world HELP.

    How do I clone my 320GB (80GB used) Hitachi OS drive (Vista 32 SP2) over to a 128GB Indilinx Torqx?

    All I really care about is Photoshop and Bridge CS4 performance. I am a pro and work 4-16 hours per day in Bridge and Photoshop, with tens of thousands of images, including 500MB - 2GB layered TIFFs. The Photoshop Scratch Disk and Bridge and CameraRaw Cache performance are killing me. Solid State Storage seems to be the perfect solution to my problem

    I really want to simply clone my 320 over to the Torqx, because it would take me a week to re-install and configure all of my software and settings that are now on the 320GB Hitachi.

    Do I just bring the Torqx up in the Vista Storage Disk Management, initialize it with one big partition, and then format it?
    What size allocation unit should I use? :
    Default? 4096? 64k? ???
    Will these settings be wiped out when I clone over the stuff from the old hard drive?
    What about "alignment"?
    What is the best software for a SIMPLE & painless clone procedure?

    I'm not a techie or geek, but have a fair working knowledge of computers.

    Any help would be hugely appreciated. Thanks.
  • userwhat - Thursday, September 17, 2009 - link

    I use Drive Snapshot for all these purposes. It works 100%, it´s a very small and fast program. After having issues with Norton Ghost and some other similar programs which were absolutely unable to restore an imaged partition stored on a DVD this is THE one to use.

    Get it here: http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/">http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/
  • dszc - Saturday, September 26, 2009 - link

    Thank you very much for your help and recommendations.
    To get my Patriot (SolidStateStorage) up and running, I used Seagate DiskWizard (an Acronis subset), as I have lots of Seagate drives already on my system and this free software seems to work.
    When I get a window of time in my schedule, I'll try DriveSnapShot and/or DriveImage to see if they do a better job in helping my Torqx SSS run at its full potential.
    Thanks again for your help.
    Dave
  • JakFrost - Tuesday, September 15, 2009 - link

    If you want to image out your current drive and migrate over to an SSD you can use the free software below that works with Windows Volume Shadow Copies to do a online live migration to another drive without losing or corrupting your data. This means that you can do this from the same OS that you are running.

    This software will allow you to image out to an already created partition that is already aligned at the 1MB boundry that is standard for Microsoft Vista/7 operating systems.

    DriveImage XML V2.11
    English (1.78MB)

    Image and Backup logical Drives and Partitions

    Price: Private Edition Free - Commercial Edition - Buy Now Go!
    System Requirements: Pentium Processor - 256 MB RAM
    Windows XP, 2003, Vista, or Windows 7

    An alternative is to use an offline migration system such as Acronis TrueImage, Norton Ghost, etc. to do the migration offline from a bootable CD or USB drive. Search around for Hiren's BootCD to check out these and other tools to do the migration.
  • dszc - Saturday, September 26, 2009 - link

    Thank you very much for your help and recommendations.
    To get my Patriot (SolidStateStorage) up and running, I used Seagate DiskWizard (an Acronis subset), as I have lots of Seagate drives already on my system and this free software seems to work.
    When I get a window of time in my schedule, I'll try DriveImage and/or DriveSnapShot to see if they do a better job in helping my Torqx SSS run at its full potential.
    Thanks again for your help.
    Dave
  • jgehrcke - Friday, September 11, 2009 - link

    Be careful when buying a Super Talent UltraDrive GX 128 GB with "XXXX" in serial number (unfortunately you cannot check this before ordering the drive). These drives are much slower than measured in the benchmark here and in other benchmarks.

    For more information and related links see

    http://gehrcke.de/2009/09/performance-issue-with-n...">http://gehrcke.de/2009/09/performance-i...est-supe...
  • Kitohru - Thursday, September 10, 2009 - link

    Does OS X Snow Leopard have trim support, and if not any word from apple about that or the like?
  • Zool - Thursday, September 10, 2009 - link

    I still dont think that with this price ssd-s will be more mainstream in the next years. And honestly the performance is not even that extra if everything would work like it should. The mechanical drives can reach now 100 MB reads when things are optimal. The small files performance is still only software problem. U should never ever reach point when u need to randomly find 4 KB files in a long row. With todays ram capacity and cpus-s programs should never read such small files or group things in larger files and read whole to memmory. A solid today programed aplication (let it be game or programs) should never let your disk spam with 30k files (like catia or other plenty of aged so called "profesional" programs). With today ram and disk capacity it should read things to memmory and let only grouped larger files on disk and never ever touch the hdd again until users isnt comunicating with the software (u can tell it to windows).Saves can be made to memmory and than write to disk without even seeing a fps drop in games(not just games) becouse of disk comunication latenci
    I dont even think the IO performance would be a problem with the RIGHT software and OS. With 100MB reads it could run perfectly fine with few seconds loading times. Even the latencies of ssd-s are no match to ram latencies so everithing that should activly comunicate with disks (which is just stupid with curent ram prices and 64bit) would just level your latencies down to disks.
    Why should worry about latencies and read speeds when u could copy it to ram and keep the files on disk in shape where the mechanical drive
    should never find itself to read files smaller than few MB.(even your
    small txt documents u can hide in archive).
    Just my toughs. (sorry for my english)
  • AlExAkE - Wednesday, September 9, 2009 - link

    Hey, I'm a web & multimedia designer. I spend lots of my time using most of the Adobe CS4 products including Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, After Effects & Premiere Pro.

    The Intel 80GB G2 looks amazing, but the Photoshop test is awful because of his write speed. The Intel 25-Extreme series seem to be the best but is to pricey. The OCZ Vertex has good write speed but is slower than Intel G2 in most of the test. What would be the recommended SSD for my purpose. Thanks

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