Tom's Storage Charts 2009: A New Test Environment

Performance: PCMark Vantage

PCMark Vantage is a very popular benchmark that was designed and is distributed by Futuremark Corporation in Finland. Consumer benchmarks such as this one are available free of charge. You will find the latest version of PCMark Vantage on the appropriate download page on futuremark.com.

PCMark Vantage has lots of features and benchmarking options. Although it is focused on system and CPU performance, the hard drive benchmarks are actually easy to use and provide reproducible and relevant results. There are six different hard drive benchmark runs, which are all based on real application scenarios. In addition to these, we add the PCMark Vantage overall score, which also takes system performance into account. The following charts show the results of the two PCMark Vantage HDD testing sections, which look at Windows Defender hard drive performance and Windows Vista startup performance.

We do not make changes to the benchmark, letting it run at its default settings. We also don’t optimize anything on the system side except turning off all features and power saving options, which may have an unpredictable impact on benchmark results. Although many of the PCMark Vantage results will reflect the first findings we get on h2benchw, PCMark actually requires a partition on the test drive(s), which makes the results especially relevant to Windows users.