Comparison drives
Setup| Storage drive | Kingston SSD Now V+ | Crucial CT64M225 SSD | Corsair X128 SSD | Samsung HD103UJ HDD | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Drive capacity | 64GB | 64GB | 128GB | 1,000GB | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Approx. price at time of writing | £135 | £180 | £275 | £55 |
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| Approx price per GB | 2.11 |
2.82 |
2.15 |
0.055 |
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| CPU | Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (2.67GHz) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Motherboard | Foxconn P45 Digital Life | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| BIOS revision | P03 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Memory | 4GB Corsair DDR2-1,066 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Host hard drive | Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500GB | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Graphics Card | Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 512MB | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Mainboard software | Intel 9.1.1.1015 |
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| Graphics driver | Catalyst 9.7 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| PSU | Corsair HX1000 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Operating System | Windows 7 Ultimate RTM, 64-bit | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tests
| 2D benchmarks | CrystalDiskMark 2.2.0m HDTune 3.50 Pro Far Cry loading test Windows 7 booting test 6.15GB large-file read and write test 123MB small-file read and write test SSD-to-SSD transfer test Disk torture - writing 25,868 (3.72GB) files back onto drive |
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Setup notes
To give some idea of basic performance, we're comparing the Kingston SSDNow V+ 64GB to two Indilinx-powered drives in the form of the same-capacity Crucial CT64M225 and 128GB Corsair X128 128GB, respectively. We've also thrown in a 1TB mechanical HDD from Samsung.
CrystalDiskMark provides throughput data based on sequential reads and writes, and random (512K/4K) reads and writes. We've used the default 100MB file-size for the tests.
Further synthetic benchmarks come in the form of HD Tune 3.50 Pro, which measures read and write speed on the unformatted drives. The program also has a benchmark for evaluating random-reading performance and the read numbers are graphed. Random-write performance is too inconsistent to provide any meaningful results, however.
In terms of real-world benchmarks, we time how long it take to transfer two sets of files to and from a Seagate 7200.11 500GB drive equipped with Windows 7 RTM. The large-file tests include two movies that total 6.15GB. The small-file test is the expanded CINEBENCH R10 benchmark folder that's 123MB in size but has 1,971 files, ranging from 26.5MB down to 1,600 or so files that are 4KB, or smaller. We appreciate that the host drive may prove to be a bottleneck in this case, yet it does represent a real-world scenario. Practically eliminating this, we've run an SSD-to-SSD test, to see how they perform in a best-case scenario.
We also hand-time how long it takes to copy a folder containing 25,868 files (3.72GB) from the drive back to the drive, as a 'copy' folder. This test stresses the read, write, and controller efficiency.
Copying an exact image on to the test drives, we time how long it takes to load Windows 7 RTM and, once within the operating system, a Far Cry 2 level.
