In a departure from what we've done in the past, we're adding out-of-box performance back into test suite today. So long as TRIM and garbage collection do their job, the performance of a desktop-oriented SSD should stay close to that level. We'll also cover the other end of the spectrum, though, conveying the performance during reads and writes to a dirty drive. Performance will always fall between those two extremes.
Firmware notes:
Because this story was already in progress when Micron released its 0309 firmware update, we wanted to note that the patch primarily resolves a BSOD error related to a power-on SMART counter. According to Crucial's change log, there should be no effect on performance.
| Test Hardware | |
|---|---|
| Processor | Intel Core i5-2400 (Sandy Bridge), 32 nm, 3.1 GHz, LGA 1155, 6 MB Shared L3, Turbo Boost Enabled |
| Motherboard | Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD7-B3 |
| Memory | Kingston Hyper-X 8 GB (2 x 4 GB) DDR3-1333 @ DDR3-1333, 1.5 V |
| System Drive | OCZ Vertex 3 240 GB SATA 6Gb/s |
| Tested Drives | Adata S511 60 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 3.3.2 |
| Adata S511 60 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 3.3.2 | |
| Corsair Force GT 3 60 GB SATA 6Gb/s Firmware: 1.3.3 | |
| Corsair Force 3 60 GB SATA 6Gb/s Firmware: 1.3.3 | |
| Crucial m4 64 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 0009 | |
| Kingston SSDNow V200+ 60 GB, Firmware: 3.3.2 | |
| Intel SSD 520 60 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: - | |
| OCZ Agility 3 60 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 2.15 | |
| OCZ Vertex 3 60 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 2.15 | |
| OWC Mercury Electra 6G SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 3.3.2 | |
| Patriot Pyro SE SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 3.3.2 | |
| RunCore Pro V 60 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware: 3.3.2 | |
| Samsung 830 64 GB SATA 6Gb/s, Firmware CXM0 | |
| Graphics | Palit GeForce GTX 460 1 GB |
| Power Supply | Seasonic 760 W, 80 PLUS Gold |
| System Software and Drivers | |
| Operating System | Windows 7 x64 Ultimate |
| DirectX | DirectX 11 |
| Driver | Graphics: Nvidia 270.61 RST: 10.6.0.1002 Virtu: 1.1.101 |
| Benchmarks | |
|---|---|
| Iometer 1.1.0 | # Workers = 1, 4 KB Random: LBA=16 GB, varying QDs, 128 KB Sequential |
| PCMark 7 | Storage Suite |
| HD Tune Pro | v5.0, LBA= Full Span |
Summary
- The Great 60 GB SandForce SSD Round-Up
- Test Setup And Firmware Notes
- 4 KB Random Performance
- 128 KB Sequential Performance
- Incompressible Sequential Write Performance: SandForce's Weakness
- PCMark 7 And Power Consumption
- Endurance Testing
- Exploring The Performance Of A Full SandForce-Based SSD
- Performance Is Defined By Flash
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