Testing
After doing a few hard drive reviews we have come up with 4 hard drive benchmarking programs we like to use here at ThinkComputers, they are HDTune, ATTO Disk Benchmark, CrystalDiskMark and Sandra’s Physical Disks benchmark. For comparison we will be testing the M225 drive against the OCZ Agility 60GB drive and Kingston SSDNow V-Series 128GB drive. The OCZ drive is based on the same Indilinx Barefoot controller and the Kingston drive has the older JMicron controller with custom firmware.
HDTune is our first test and it tests the average read and access time of the drive.
Not bad performance on the HDTune test, although it did fall short of the 250MB/s advertised read speed. Next up we have the ATTO Disk Benchmark which measures transfer rates across specific lengths.
ATTO was spot on giving is a read speed of around 250MB/s and around 181MB/s write, not too shabby at all! Sandra’s Physical Disks benchmark is another benchmark that will test the drive bandwidth and access time.
The Sandra Physical Disks Benchmark gave us a 239MB/s read score. Finally we finish up our testing with CrystalDiskMark. CrystalDiskMark has a sequential read / write test as well as a 512k and 4k random read / write test.
Notice the performance difference of the OCZ drive and the M225 over the Kingston drive that is based off the older JMicron controller.
