Testing – HDTune Pro
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 Solid 2 Series drive against the Corsair Nova 128GB drive and the OCZ Agility 60GB drive. The Corsair drive is based on the identical Barefoot controller as the Solid 2 drive, just a larger capacity and the OCZ Agility drive is based on the older Barefoot controller. Keep in mind the advertised speeds for this drive is 200MB/s read and 120MB/s write.
HDTune is our first test and it tests the average read and access time of the drive.
As you can see very solid performance here, the average was 216.8MB/s which is actually above the 200MB/s advertised read speed of the drive. Next is the write benchmark in HDTune.
Once again there is very solid performance; the graph really shows that there isn’t much change in write speed throughout the test. The average write speed of the drive was also above the advertised speed. Since the release of HDTune 3.5 there has been a new Random Access test added to the software. This test measures the performance of random read and write operations. Tests are taken in 512b, 4KB, 64KB, 1MB, and random file sizes. The performance of the drive is reported in operations a second (IOPS), average access time and average speed.
Very good speeds here too, the 4K test scored 7447 IOPS. Finally the write test…
This drive actually had better IOPS scores in the write test than the Corsair Nova drive.
