OWC Mercury Accelsior 480GB PCI-E Solid State Drive Review

Testing – HD Tune Pro
HD Tune Pro is one of the most popular hard drive software suites available. It has many different benchmarks and tests built into it.  We will be running both the read and write benchmarks.

hdtune read

hdtune write

After seeing these results I was a little worried, but after running all of the other tests it seems this drive does not like HD Tune that much.  We have actually noticed that many newer drives do not perform up to spec using HD Tune 5.0.

Now we have the Random Access test.  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. Here are both the results from the read and write random access tests.

hdtune io read

hdtune io write

Here we can see the drive performing up to speed.  In case you were wondering we normally like the see 5000 IOPS and over in the 4K test.  You can see that it exceeded that in both the read and write tests.

In HD Tune Pro 5.0 the file benchmark is actually 2 tests now.  The first is the normal file benchmark we are used to see that tests different transfer speeds over specific file lengths.

hdtune file1

The newly added file benchmark also tests a file size (500MB for our test) and gives you sequential read and write speeds.  It also gives you IOPS for 4KB random single and 4K random multi.

hdtune file2

As you can see from both of the graphs above the drive performs right up to specifications.
HD Tune also has a set of extra tests.  Here are the results of those for both read and write.

hdtune extra read

hdtune extra write

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