Installation & Testing
Since this is a 30GB drive there really are only a few uses for it. One of the most common would be for a netbook. It just so happens we are testing a Lenovo S10-2 netbook so I decided for this particular drive I would test it against the 160GB Western Digital Scorpio Blue drive that comes with the S10-2.
I simply mirrored the drive and installed it on the Vertex drive so everything is the same on each drive. From there I ran a variety of different benchmarks. The S10-2 runs on an Intel Atom N270 CPU running at 1.6GHz, it has 1GB of memory, and we are running Windows XP Home Edition. Before we get into testing understand that many of these programs are designed for normal hard drives, no SSD’s so sometimes we might get some weird results.
First up we have HD Tune, which reports transfer speeds, burst rate, access time, and CPU usage. The Vertex test is on the left and the Scorpio is on the right.
As you can see there is a huge difference in speeds here. The Vertex drive gave us an average transfer speed of 96.6 MB/s compared to the Scorpio’s 53.5 MB/s. Also look at the access time 0.2ms compared to 16.6ms. Take note at the 2 graphs also, the Vertex drive keeps the same transfer and access time through most of the test as the Scorpio slowly drops off.
HDTach is up next. It is just like HD Tunes as it tests transfer speeds. Once again the Vertex drive is on the left and the Scorpio drive is on the right.
As expected we have the same results. This time the Vertex had an average read speed of 104.8 MB/s compared to the Scorpio’s 56.4 MB/s.
ATTO Disk Benchmark has been around for quite some time and it gives you a lot of options when testing, but I decided to run both tests at the stock settings. The Vertex drive is on the left and the Scorpio drive is on the right.
As you can see the Vertex drive maxed out around 140 MB/s read and 130 MB/s write. That is pretty fast compared to the around 68 MB/s the Scorpio was doing during both tests.
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