System Speed Test Benchmarks

EDITORS NOTE: Please read Solid State Drive (SSD) Benchmark Performance Testing to understand how the benchmarks used in this article should be interpreted.

It's show time! All claims to performance are either made real or proven false in our testing, and although SSD's clearly offer some advantages it sometimes takes seeing a product compared to the performance of others to prove the point. During our re-testing process, I decided to take action and get System Speed Test v4.78 back in our test rotation. This software is solid, and the results are more accurate than any others available.

I doubt that when DOS died, Vladimir Afanasiev ever thought he would see his System Speed Test software used again in professional reviews. This program offers comprehensive system information, but it also has a powerful benchmarking tool for memory, processor, and disks. In terms of disk performance, it measures interface and physical transfer rates, seek and access times at the hardware level, and it does so without delay or interference from Operating System software or running processes. This is why Benchmark Reviews will continue to use this test: it polls its results directly from the hardware!

To detect the Random Access Time of each device, we ran full test routines on all products a total of five times. In nearly every benchmark the result was extremely close to the collection, thus our charts represent the average of all readings. Very obvious in our results was the distinct difference in potential notebook access time at the start of our chart, compared to the current notebook access time on the far right.

Bandwidth is a whole other consideration once you record the results. In our tests, Seagate's 7200.11 drive with 32MB cache buffer really showed its strength as it narrowly outperformed the Western Digital Raptor. Close on the Raptors' tail (pun) was the OCZ SATA-II Solid State Drive. Following closely behind the OCZSSD2 is the remainder of SSD's, finished off by the original OCZ SSD.

Looked at a different way, and ignoring the dominant buffered read speed results trend set by the Hard Disk Drives, the OCZSSD2 actually did well to hold ground against the Raptor, and is well ahead of the other SSD's. The 32MB buffer in the 7200.11 is not within reach, but the OCZ SATA-II SSD still shows real promise in the linear read speed tests.

Although Benchmark Reviews completely endorses the test results of System Speed Test for our benchmarking, it's always good to have other sources. We decided to then test the 32GB OCZ SATA-II SSD OCZSSD2-1S32G 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive using the HD Tach RW and ATTO Disk Benchmark tool in the following sections. Please continue to see if our results were a fluke or not.

<< Previous Page - Next Page >>