Test Methodology
We've benchmarked a wide range of SSDs in recent months, with capacities ranging from 40GB to 160GB.
All previous results will be included in today's review, but what we're really interested in seeing is how Patriot's 120GB Inferno compares to OCZ's 120GB Vertex 2. Armed with the same controller and the same 16 flash memory chips, both drives are seemingly identical, but are separated by two key factors; price and firmware.
At the time of writing, the Inferno is roughly £15 cheaper than the Vertex 2, but given OCZ's close working relationship to SandForce, we reckon there's a good chance the Vertex 2 will have the edge in performance.
Here's a brief overview of all the drives tested and a description of our benchmarks:
Comparison drives |
||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Storage drive | G.Skill Phoenix Pro | Crucial Real SSD C300 | Crucial Real SSD C300 | Corsair Force Series F80 | G.Skill Phoenix Pro (x2) | OCZ Vertex 2 | Patriot Inferno | Corsair Force Series F80 (x2) | Samsung HD103SJ | Samsung HD103SJ (x2) |
| Total capacity | 40GB | 64GB | 64GB | 80GB | 80GB | 120GB | 120GB | 160GB | 1TB | 2TB |
| Drive type | SSD | SSD | SSD | SSD | SSD | SSD | SSD | SSD | HDD | HDD |
| Drive firmware | 2.1 | 002 | 002 | 1.1 | 2.1 | 1.11 | 320A13F0 | 1.1 | 1AJ100E4 | 1AJ100E4 |
| Connection method | SATA 3Gbps, AHCI | SATA 3Gbps, AHCI | SATA 6Gbps, AHCI | SATA 3Gbps, AHCI | SATA 3Gbps, AHCI | SATA 3Gbps, AHCI | SATA 3Gbps, AHCI | SATA 3Gbps, AHCI | SATA 3Gbps, AHCI | SATA 3Gbps, AHCI |
| Controller used | Intel ICH10R | Intel ICH10R | Marvell PCIe | Intel ICH10R | Intel ICH10R | Intel ICH10R | Intel ICH10R | Intel ICH10R | Intel ICH10R | Intel ICH10R |
| RAID configuration | - | - | - | - | RAID 0 | - | - | RAID 0 | - | RAID 0 |
| Approx. price | £80 | £90 | £90 | £145 | £160 | £175 | £160 | £290 | £45 | £90 |
| Approx. price per GB | £2 | £1.4 | £1.4 | £1.8 | £2 | £1.5 | £1.3 | £1.8 | £0.05 | £0.05 |
Test bench |
|||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Core i7 965 Extreme Edition (3.20GHz, 8MB L3 cache, quad-core, LGA1366 - Turbo Boost enabled) | ||||||||
| Motherboard | ASUS P6X58D Premium | ||||||||
| Memory | 6GB Corsair DDR3 | ||||||||
| Host hard drive | Corsair Nova V128 SSD | ||||||||
| Storage controllers | Intel ICH10R controller (SATA 3Gbps) and Marvell PCIe controller (SATA 6Gbps) | ||||||||
| Graphics Card | Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 1GB / AMD Radeon HD 6850 1GB | ||||||||
| PSU | Corsair HX1000W | ||||||||
| Operating System | Windows 7 Ultimate, 64-bit | ||||||||
Benchmarks |
|
|---|---|
| ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.46 | The freeware ATTO benchmark provides basic sequential speed results for both read and write operations. Using the default queue depth of four, we record read and write speeds during 1MB transfers. |
| CrystalDiskMark v3.0 | CrystalDiskMark provides various storage benchmarks, but we're interested in the returned 32-thread 4K performance numbers to see how well the drives fare when tasked with numerous small transfers. |
| AS SSD v1.5.3x | Another freeware benchmark, AS SSD is designed primarily for testing solid-state storage. We run the benchmark and record the drive's overall read and write scores. The final numbers take into account sequential speeds, input/output performance and access time. |
| Iometer v2008.06.18-RC2 | Iometer is an I/O subsystem measurement tool originally developed by Intel. To measure a drive's I/O performance, we set the benchmark to utilise 4KB transfers in a random spread. Read and write distribution is set to 50 per cent, and queue depth at 32. The test is run for two minutes and we record the total I/Os per second. |
| PCMark Vantage v1.0.2.0 | Emulating real-world use, PCMark Vantage spits out a bunch of data on the relative speed of the drives when undertaking common tasks. We record Windows startup, application load time and gaming performance. |
