System Overview & Testing Procedures
The system we are going to be installing the C300 in is comprised of an Intel Core i7 965, Gigabyte X58A-UD3R motherboard, 6GB of memory, Radeon 4870 X2 video card, 1TB SATA drive, Blu-ray drive, and Thermaltake EVO_Blue power supply, all inside the Thermaltake Armor A90 case.
Before we get into testing let’s open CrystalDiskInfo and take a look. As you can see the drive is running at SATA 3Gbps and supports S.M.A.R.T., 48bit LBA, NCQ, and most importantly TRIM.
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)
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 2 against these 2 other drives…
– Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB (Review)
– Corsair Force Series F100 100GB (Review)
The Corsair Force F100 is running the same SandForce SF-1200 chip as the Vertex 2. We will be comparing the drive to the RealSSD C300 as well, but the C300 runs on SATA 6G so it is not a fair comparison, but we included it because it is the fastest drive we have tested to date.
Ehm… “For comparison we will be testing the C300 against these 2 other drives…”
Should this say: “For comparison we will be testing the 'Vertex 2 Extended' against these 2 other drives…”
Thanks for that, it has been changed
OCZ Vertex2 120G SSD does not have 13% reserve space but 8%. The “real” chip size is 128. A 100G has 28% reserve space.
8G of 120G is 6.6% only.
The NAND density is actually 2^37 or 137,438,953,472 Bytes.
The drive density is 120,034,123,776 Bytes.
That’s 12.66%.
Awesome review, Bob!
I just picked up this drive to put in my MacBook Pro. Got it for $199cdn after rebate. Man the prices sure have dropped on these things. Can’t wait till they get to $1/GB or less! 😉
Nice to see that you finally made it over to the site Gary! Prices sure are dropping after CES this year things will go down even more! I can’t wait to see what new SSD stuff they are going to show us at CES!
The last time I was on your site I believe it was a previous theme. I
haven’t been keeping up with PC stuff lately after I switched over to Mac
(the dark side). 😉
I love theme of your site. Lookin’ good man. I’ll be back to see what you
dig up from CES!
The last time I was on your site I believe it was a previous theme. I
haven’t been keeping up with PC stuff lately after I switched over to Mac
(the dark side). 😉
I love theme of your site. Lookin’ good man. I’ll be back to see what you
dig up from CES!