SSD Performance In The Office: Nine Applications Benchmarked
Table of contents
- 1. Dissecting Office Productivity
- 2. Hardware Setup And Benchmarks
- 3. File Copy: Text
- 4. Video Transcoding
- 5. Microsoft Outlook: Email
- 6. Microsoft Word: Typing
A number of metrics are used to quantify storage performance. If you're a regular Joe, you have to be wondering how such dry terminology can apply to office work. Rather than telling you, we're going to dissect several routine computing tasks.
Twice now, we've examined the storage characteristics of games, bringing us up to a total of six different titles, often with very different results. In case you missed those stories, they're:
Exploring SSD Performance In Battlefield 3, F1 2011, And Rift
SSD Performance In Crysis 2, World Of Warcraft, And Civilization V
Of course, gamers use their computers for other tasks, too. We've seen a number of requests asking that we apply the same type of storage analysis to more common productivity-oriented tasks, and we're here to help try to quantify the impact of an SSD in those applications as well.
If you're still on the fence about even considering an SSD in your next build, check out Should You Upgrade? From A Hard Drive To An SSD. The benchmarks in that piece give you some raw performance data. However, they don't explain why the SSD outperforms the hard drive in one scenario, and then not in the next.
For that, we need to dig deeper under the hood and analyse I/O. SSD reviews typically offer a handful of measurements that try to quantify performance. Those familiar metrics include: sequential writes, sequential reads, random reads, and random writes. If those terms are foreign to you, take a quick minute to check out our break-down in Understanding Storage Performance. Addressing application behaviour using those four pillars lets us more accurately identify the storage solution that'll address your needs.
As a continuation of our previous two pieces, today we're examining more pedestrian computing tasks, such as file copying, antivirus scanning, transcoding, compression, and more. The goal, of course, is to give you a better understanding of how these tasks tax your storage subsystem.
In the "hardware setup and benchmarks" page there is a title wrong: "games" instead of "applications"...
current firmware is 2.15 for vertex 3 and it does impact perfs
Most of us are happy once we are there.
The reality is it isn't there that matters as you touched upon. It's how fast you got there.
This article seemed a bit useless, just like the gaming one. Although, I gave it even less time and skimmed more than ever. Systems are used to having slow hdds to fall back on. It's no wonder that once something is loaded you're not exactly reaping the rewards of superfast storage in anything other than file browsing.
That would support your rather pointless conclusion. Which drew upon what exactly???
At least we don't have someone missing the point of the ssd in the first 3 posts today though like with the gaming article with ssds. Newsflash, we use ssds because the waiting times are reduced. Not for fps in games or to type faster; that's what GPUs and hands are for. Can't be bothered to revisit the posts, but no, you aren't better off with fast hdds in raid you absolute bone shaking nonce. You are better off coming home, turning on your pc and playing skyrim in under a minute and having loading times so fast you can't read the obligatory writing they put on load screens now-a-days for those still living in the dark mechanical days of computing which is naught but for storage now.
I can turn my computer on and off and boot a game and be playing before some people can go from a ready desktop to the same stage, playing.
So, I say, pointless article is pointless. Just like my comments which were typed so much faster using my ssd to mash the keys with.
P.s. Typing and running programs from the command line has never been better. It's at your fingertips now.
Good luck with your weloh-sa-craptors or whatever they are called submerged in Bangkok