Solid State Drive or Hard Drive: which is better for your needs? - Page 4 - Benchmarks

*Parts were either provided by the manufacturer for the purposes of this and other articles or purchased by me. I handle such items in a professional manner and do not let manufacturers influence the content of the articles aside from fact checking.

Benchmarks
Boot Racer

Boot Racer is a simple program that times the boot process of a computer to the logon screen and desktop.

I ran each test three times and averaged their results to give a better picture of how each drive performed. Boot Racer was the first program installed after essential drivers so the drives would have as little hindering them as possible. You can see that the OCZ Apex and Vertex drives were neck and neck throughout all of the passes. The Vertex and Apex averaged 14 and 13 seconds respectively to the logon. Those same drives averaged 22.33 and 22.67 seconds to the desktop. This is compared to the Seagate's average logon screen time of 27 seconds and desktop time of 36.33 seconds. You can see that the OCZ SSD drives were roughly twice as fast as the Seagate 7200RPM drive.

Everest Ultimate

Everest Ultimate is a test suite that has benchmarks for just about every area of the computer. It also includes useful system information sections.

This test shows the consistency with which some SSD operate and the usage specific nature of a standard hard drive. The OCZ Vertex pulled in transfer rates of 208.1 to 215MB/second while the Apex had 146 to 158.7 with an outlier at 182.4. The Seagate 7200RPM drive had a degrading trend over the Linear Read operations, but performed well in random and buffered tests. Notice that the buffered read test showed the Seagate 7200RPM drive barely edge out the Apex. A notable mention that is not shown in the chart is the average read access time in milliseconds (ms). The Vertex, Apex and Seagate had 0.1, 0.21, and 15.13ms respectively.

ATTO DIsk Benchmark

ATTO disk benchmark is benchmark that is, not surprisingly, only for benchmarking storage drives. It is a compact program that has various customizable settings for tests. For the purposes of these tests I set the program to 4KB to 1024KB block sizes with 32MB total.

The OCZ Vertex drive is a high performance SSD and therefore will continue the trend of outperforming both of the other drives by a slim to large margin. The interesting bit of data from this test is that the Seagate and Apex drives both perform at nearly identical levels throughout each block size in the write tests.

These are the read performance figures for the benchmark. Both the read and write tests run at the same time, but it would be a jumbled mess to show them in the same chart. The Seagate drive caps out at around 107MB/s. The Vertex and Apex drives cap out at 233MB/s and 214MB/s respectively. Again you see the large performance difference between the two types of drives.

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