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. The highest and lowest scores were ignored, and the remainder was averaged. However, in nearly every single access time benchmark the test results were identical. In the bandwidth tests the results were extremely close to the others, but required averaging.

The System Speed Test access time benchmark places the OCZ 64 GB Core Series SSD near the lower-end of our results. At 0.38 ms access time, the only SSD's that have done worse than OCZ's CORE SSD are the Crucial CT32GBFAB0 SSD and Super Talent MasterDrive MX SSD. Even OCZ's first SSD, the OCZSSD64GB, managed to provide a faster response time. In reality, you couldn't begin to perceive the differences, but technology should get better with time and not the other way around.

Bandwidth is a whole other consideration once you record the results. In our tests, both the Western Digital Raptor and Seagate 7200.11 Hard Disk Drives showed strength as only a few SSD's could match or beat the buffered read performance. Close on the Raptors' tail was the OCZ OCZSSD2-1S32G which is based off of the Samsung MCCOE64G5MPP-0VA SSD. The Seagate 7200.11 HDD was nearly matched in buffered read bandwidth by the Super Talent FTM60GK25H and Silicon Power SP064GBSSD25SV10. OCZ's CORE SSD performed at the same level as the Crucial/Lexar SATA-II SSD, and the remainder of SSD's end with 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 top SSD's actually did well to hold ground against the Raptor and 7200.11, which are at the very top-end of HDD performance. The 32MB buffer in the 7200.11 makes a 7200 RPM HDD difficult to keep pace with, and the 10,000 RPM spindle speed offer enough of an advantage to keep the Raptor on top.

Disk Hardware Tested:

OCZ SATA-II 32GB 2.5" SSD OCZSSD2-1S32G
OCZ SATA-II 64GB Core Series 2.5" SSD OCZSSD2-1C64G
OCZ SATA-II 64GB 2.5" SSD OCZSSD2-1S64G
Mtron MOBI 3000 16GB 2.5" SATA SSD MSD-SATA3025
OCZ 64GB 2.5" SATA SSD OCZSSD64GB
Mtron Pro 7000 16GB 2.5-Inch 16GB SSD SATA7025
MemoRight GT 64GB 2.5" SATA SSD MR25.2-064S
Crucial / Lexar 32GB 2.5" SATA-2 SSD CT32GBFAB0
Samsung 64GB 2.5" SATA-2 SSD MCCOE64G5MPP-0VA
Super Talent MasterDrive MX 60GB 2.5" SATA-II SSD FTM60GK25H
Silicon Power 64GB 2.5" SATA SSD SP064GBSSD25SV10
Western Digital Raptor 74GB 3.5" WD740ADFD 10,000 RPM SATA Hard Disk Drive (16MB Cache Buffer)
Seagate 7200.11 500GB 3.5" ST3500320AS 7,200 RPM SATA-II Hard Disk Drive (32MB Cache Buffer)

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 OCZ 64 GB Core Series SSD OCZSSD2-1C64G 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.

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