Benchmark Results: Drive Speed
With SSD prices falling dramatically over the last several months, it's not surprising that we've seen solid-state storage appear far more frequently in mobility and performance-oriented systems. In this climate, it's not even that unusual to see a two SSDs paired together in performance desktops.
In our Millennium review unit, Origin decided to pair up two of Intel's top-end SSD 520 drives in a RAID 0 configuration for increased speed. As we said earlier, this increases the likelihood of drive failure, since a problem with one drive effectively destroys your boot partition. But when it comes to raw performance, the dual-SSD RAID 0 setup soars past the 7,200 RPM hard drive in CyberPower's LAN Party Evo.
As we expected, the Millennium's two SSDs far outperform the CyberPower system's single hard drive across the board. The general makeup of solid-state storage, combined with the fact that the Origin system has two writable drives, means that drive speed actually goes up along with queue depth. With more files being read or written at once, both read and write speeds approach 1GB/s at a queue depth of four. Meanwhile, the CyberPower drive's performance, limited by its mechanical actuator arm, sees a slight drop in performance as queue depth increases.
If the Millennium was stocked solely with a pair of 120 GB SSDs in RAID 0, we'd probably be knocking it for cramped storage space and the increased danger of drive failure. But Origin smartly pairs fast SSDs with a 1 TB mechanical drive. This gives you extra space for media and programs that aren't as performance-sensitive. There's also plenty of room for backing up an image of the system's boot drive, which we'd strongly suggest you do regularly, given the increased risk of failure inherent to any striped setup.
Origin includes a pair of DVDs that hold the stock drive image, along with a Windows disk. While these discs can get you back up and running in a pinch, they can't replace all the programs and files that you've accumulated since purchasing the system. With this configuration of the Millennium, Origin does a good job of providing the tools to keep all that data safe, but the burden of actually backing up on a regular basis is still on the buyer.
