Tom's Storage Charts 2009: A New Test Environment

Test Setup Overview and Settings

The following table lists all of the system components we use in our new storage reference system. In addition to the Supermicro motherboard and Intel Core i7 processor, we picked Corsair DDR3 memory and two rather old components: an ATI Radeon HD 3450 graphics card, and a Seagate NL35 400 GB hard drive. Neither is particularly fast, but they don’t have to be. The graphics card doesn’t matter at all for storage testing, and the hard drive is only important for system and benchmark startup. Since neither of these components affects benchmark performance on test drives, we could use essentially any component we wanted.

We picked the Radeon HD 3450, as it requires relatively low power and is passively cooled. The Seagate hard drive was one of the first business drives validated for 24/7 operation. Since we happened to have three of these drives in our labs, we decided to go with this one, so we can quickly replace a faulty drive should a problem arise, restoring the benchmarking state within a few minutes without changing the type of hard drive.

Component Settings

We installed Windows Vista Ultimate with Service Pack 1 and turned off all maintenance and visual options, as well as SuperFetch, to make sure that performance doesn’t vary due to any of the built-in Windows features. In addition, we switched off all power saving mechanisms for the same reason: performance has to be reproducible. As we found recently, using power saving options does have an impact on performance of the fastest SSDs, such as Intel’s X25-M.

The memory runs at default CL9 timings, which isn’t fast, but again, it doesn’t have to be; reliability was our key priority. We installed all drivers that are typically required to get good performance: ATI’s 8.12 Catalyst release, Intel’s Chipset Installation Utility version 9.1.0.1007 and the Matrix Storage drivers from Intel, version 8.7.0.1007.