Test Setup And Method
| System Hardware | |
|---|---|
| Hardware Details | |
| CPU | Intel Core i7-920 (Bloomfield), 45 nm, 3.2 GHz, 8 MB L3 Cache |
| Motherboard (LGA 1366) | EVGA 132-BL-E758-TR, Intel X58 Express/ICH10R, BIOS: 6.00 PG |
| SATA Driver | Intel Rapid Storage Technology Driver 10.1.0.1008 |
| RAM | 6 GB (3x2GB) DDR3-1600 OCZ Platinum (OCZ3P1600LV6GK) |
| HDD | Samsung Spinpoint F3 1 TB (103SJ), Firmware 1AJ10001 |
| SSD Test Drive 1 | Intel X25-M G2 80 GB (SSDSA2M080G2GC), Firmware 2CV102M3 |
| SSD Test Drive 2 | OCZ Vertex 2 240 GB (P75HAVO6H3N8E278), Firmware 1.29 |
| Graphics Card | EVGA SuperClocked 01G-P3-1563-AR GeForce GTX 560 Ti (Fermi) 1 GB 256-bit GDDR5 (SLI) |
| Power Supply | Corsair CMPSU-850TX |
| Benchmarks | |
| Performance Measurements | CrystalMarkDisk 3.0 x64 |
| PCMark Vantage 1.0.2.0 | |
| I/O Performance | IOMeter 2008.08.18 |
| Fileserver-Benchmark | |
| Webserver-Benchmark | |
| Database-Benchmark | |
| Workstation-Benchmark | |
| Streaming Reads | |
| Streaming Writes | |
| 4k Random Reads | |
| 4k Random Writes | |
| System Software & Drivers | |
| Operating System | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-Bit |
The test system is configured in much the same way an average enthusiast would set up his machine. It's a great example of tiered storage, with the SSD hosting our operating system and a handful of widely used application. Games, user folders, and all other files are held on the storage drive.
For the purposes of testing, we Secure Erased each SSD before installing Windows 7. Each benchmark was conducted from within the OS with two days between each test to prevent issues with drive throttling, seen mainly with the SandForce SF-1200 drives. More details on that phenomenon can be found on OCZ's own forum in this thread: Understanding SF1200 drives, TRIM, OP area use and Life write throttle.
Additionally, we partitioned our OCZ Vertex 2 drive down to 74.4 GB to equal storage capacity of Intel's second-gen X25-M, and to increase the overprovisioning on the OCZ Vertex 2 drive. To be clear, our goal isn't to compare Intel against OCZ so much as we want to measure speed/space before and after some of these popularly-discussed tweaks.