How We Exam, System Specs

Forth with an assortment of wink drives, we've included the Western Digital 4TB iii.5" 7200RPM and Western Digital Velociraptor 1TB 10,000RPM difficult drives for comparing's sake. Other SSDs tested take controllers such equally the SandForce SF-2281, JMicron JMF616, Intel PC29AS218A, Marvell 88SS9174, Toshiba TC58NCF618GBT and Samsung S3C29MAX01. Our testing suite consists of four constructed criterion programs and our own file copying and load time tests.

Every bit you probable know, while manufacturers claim impressive peak I/O operation out of the box, this functioning can diminish over time. Unlike a conventional difficult drive, any write operation made to an SSD is a two-pace process: a data block must be erased and and then written to. Apparently if the drive is new and unused there will exist nothing to erase and therefore the first stride can be bypassed, just this simply happens once unless the bulldoze is trimmed.

Considering this, we'll exam how much performance y'all tin await to lose from each SSD over time. Nosotros'll examine all drives in their clean unused state, and then run the Hard disk drive Tach total benchmark several times to fill the entire bulldoze. This simulates heavy usage and conspicuously indicates how performance will be afflicted after normal long-term use.

All drives in this roundup support the Windows 7 TRIM function, which is meant to counteract these negative furnishings.

Test System Specs

  • Intel Core i7-3770K (LGA1155)
  • x2 4GB DDR3-1600 Chiliad.Skill (CAS eight-8-8-twenty)
  • Asrock Z77 Extreme11 (Intel Z77)
  • OCZ ZX Series (1250w)
  • Western Digital Blackness 4TB (3Gb/s)
  • Western Digital Velociraptor 1TB (3Gb/s)
  • OCZ Vector 512GB (6Gb/southward)
  • OCZ Vector 256GB (6Gb/s)
  • OCZ Vertex 450 256GB (6Gb/southward)
  • OCZ Vertex 4 256GB (6Gb/southward)
  • OCZ Agility iv 256GB (6Gb/southward)
  • OCZ Octane 512GB (6Gb/s)
  • Kingston HyperX 3K 240GB (6Gb/due south)
  • Kingston SSDNow V+200 240GB (6Gb/southward)
  • Crucial m4 256GB (6Gb/s)
  • Crucial v4 256GB (3Gb/s)
  • Intel SSD 520 Series 240GB (6Gb/s)
  • Intel SSD 510 Series 120GB (6Gb/s)
  • Intel SSD 320 Serial 300GB (3Gb/s)
  • Samsung SSD 840 Pro 512GB (6Gb/s)
  • Samsung SSD 830 512GB (6Gb/due south)
  • Asus GeForce GTX 680 (3072MB)

Software

  • Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 (64-bit)
  • Nvidia Forceware 320.xiv