System Overview & Testing Procedures
With all new SATA 6GB/s solid state drives if you want to achieve the best performance you are going to want to test them on a second generation Intel Core system. So we will be testing it on our Intel P67 test system, which is comprised of the following components.
Processor: Intel Core i5-2500K Processor
Motherboard: MSI P67A-GD55 Motherboard
Memory: 8GB Patriot Viper Xtreme Division 2 DDR3-1866
Video Card: Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 1GB
Power Supply: Zalman ZM1000-HP Plus 1000W
Storage: Western Digital 1TB SATA 6GB/s hard drive
Optical: ASUS Blu-ray drive
Cooling: Thermaltake FRIO CPU Cooler
Case: Cooler Master CM 690 II Advanced Case
Opening up CrystalDiskInfo we can see all the information about the drive. As you can see this drive does support TRIM as all new solid state drives do.
For testing the drive we will be using the following benchmarking programs, we have provided links to each so you can run the benchmarks as well.
– HDTune Pro (download)
– Sandra Physical Disks Benchmark (download)
– ATTO Disk Benchmark (download)
– CrystalDiskMark 64bit (download)
– AS SSD Benchmark (download)
– AIDA64 Disk Benchmark (download)
We also made these optimization changes…
– No power saving options in the BIOS
– ACHI enabled in the BIOS
– Windows 7 User Account Control (UAC) is disabled
– Windows 7 power saving settings are disabled
For comparison we will be testing the Vertex 3 drive against these other solid state drives.
OCZ Vertex 3 240GB (Review)
Patriot Inferno 120GB (Review)
Corsair Force F120 120GB (Review)
Now on to testing!
