PCMark 8 Real-World Software Performance
This is our first set of tests with real software traces, which will show us the small differences between SSDs in the wild, outside of contrived benchmarks.
For details on our real-world software performance testing, please click here.
The greatest performance increase you'll see from a single component comes from swapping out mechanical storage in favor of an SSD. As long as your drive of choice is reliable, the difference between one SSD and another is fairly small under normal consumer workloads.
Service Times
Now that we've combed through the corner-case tests, we can focus on real-world performance with software we all use every day.
A few tenths of a second in each service time benchmark might not seem like a lot, but over the course of a day, they add up. Admittedly, choosing one SSD over another won't double your productivity. Would you turn down an extra 10 or 20 minutes of getting stuff done, though?
Throughput
The throughput result, which averages all of the tests into one comparable score, mimics what we observed in the individual workloads. Patriot's Ignite 480GB has trouble capitalizing on its admirable sequential throughput because random performance handicaps running applications.