Setting the Drive Up & Testing Procedures
Our test bench for SSD’s is comprised of the following components…
Processor: Intel i7-2600K
Motherboard: ASUS P8P67 Deluxe Motherboard
Graphics: Sapphire Radeon HD6450 FleX
Memory: 4GB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1600 Special Edition
Power: Corsair TX650 650W Power Supply
Cooling: Asetek 550LC 120MM Watercooler
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB SATA 6GB/s Hard Drive
Case: Thermaltake Armor A60 Case
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
One you have your drive installed you are going to want to install the Dataplex software. It does not come with the drive you will have to download it from OCZ’s website. You are given the serial key which will enable the software.
Once you download the software and start the install you are prompted to select your target drive and your cache drive. Once you do that the software finishes installing and you need to reboot your system for the changes to take effect.
For this solid state drive we will be testing the original drive (Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB SATA 6GB/s) against the hybrid solution (Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB SATA 6GB/s + the OCZ Synapse Drive). Also we will be running the hybrid tests 3 times, as we should see significantly improved performance over more than once test. Our battery of benchmarks include the following:
ATTO Disk Benchmark
CrystalDiskMark
Anvil Storage Utilities
SiSoftware Sandra Physical Disks Benchmark
PCMark Vantage – HDD Test Suite
BootRacer
