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 |
Previous
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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
Ask a Category Expert
Ms-Office
Adobe pdf reader
a web browser, a photo manipulating program
a music/video player.
Install a game from a ISO.
An antivirus
And all these apps should be installed from the SSD itself (meaning their setups should be on the SSD).
Then you should test the startup and shutdown times.
All these synthetic benchies dont make much sense, IMHO.
Ms-Office
Adobe pdf reader
a web browser, a photo manipulating program
a music/video player.
Install a game from a ISO.
An antivirus
And all these apps should be installed from the SSD itself (meaning their setups should be on the SSD).
Then you should test the startup and shutdown times.
All these synthetic benchies dont make much sense, IMHO.
A lot of operations use only a single core and the SSD cant use its true potential. That is, the CPU cant process data as fast as the SSD can provide.
This is just reverse of what happens in case of mechanical HDD's.
You're not going to see a major difference.
Well, it is pointless though since everything you are doing is so fast that it doesn't matter anymore. I however see your point since I can be loading a program and my SSD is not even at max speed my CPU frequency is maxed out. The only way to get more speed is to just overclock as much as you can.
that is the point of buying a cheaper SSD based on a chepaer NAND.
I'd also like to see small drives benchmarked as swap drives in video editing machines. Currently I'm using a raid 0 array of 1tb samsung drives that keeps up well enough, but I'd be interested to see if there are tangible productivity differences.
For a future SSD review/roundup could you take, for example, 10 real-life traces from 10 different editor's machines (the more variation in workload, the better), and then compare the %change in execution time vs. a reference drive?
Great article.
Can we get a "Best motherboards for the money" type?
Thanks.
You can comment on, wish for, or suggest a product be tested without implying there's some kind of intentional skewing or fault in the data collected.
I recommend upping your budget to a larger drive. Otherwise m4.
I already do that, just pick up a cheap 30-64GB SSD and move the virtually memory over to it. As for killing the page file well good luck as that doesn't work. If it did there would be 36gb worth of more free space. As for using a ssd for only page file well it really does work and it doesn't degrade as quickly as you might think. When there is no static data for the controller to deal with while there is high read/write the drive tends to not have the same issues as most get. Just under 6,000 hours of heavy use and my 30gb kingston ssd is holding up.
It's a bloody long test that I've decided to reserve for comparing between different SSDs employing different controllers. It would have probably taken a full week to test all the SSDs and that only would happen if we were test 24x7 and perfectly timed the drive swaps ;p
We sent an invitation to Mushkin. They did not respond in proper time for this roundup. In any event, Toggle at 60 GB is quite rare. Though, I agree, it would have been an interesting contender. Unfortunately, we didn't want to put the roundup on the back burner any longer, because we've made multiple postponements to accommodate this that and the other.
Cheers,
Andrew Ku
TomsHardware.com
I believe you're referring to our Best SSDs column? If you want something different, feel free to suggest it.
Sure! Read our controller agnostic 60 GB roundup.
Cheers,
Andrew Ku
TomsHardware.com