How We Exam, System Specs

The Intel SSD 510 Series 120GB, OCZ Vertex three and Crucial RealSSD C300 characteristic SATA 6Gb/south connectivity, requiring us to examination using the Sandy Bridge (LGA1155) platform. All other 3Gb/due south drives were tested on our older LGA1366 platform, merely this shouldn't bear on the results. A few select SATA 3Gb/southward drives were tested on our LGA1155 organization to check for accuracy, both constructed and real-world performance were much the same.

In addition to our featured flash devices, the Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB three.5" 7200RPM hard drive has been included for comparing'south sake. Other SSDs tested for comparison feature controllers such equally the SandForce SF-1200, JMicron JMF616, Intel PC29AS218A, Marvell 88SS9174, Toshiba TC58NCF618GBT and Samsung S3C29MAX01. Our testing suite consists of four constructed benchmark programs and our own file copying and load time tests.

As you likely know, while manufacturers claim impressive peak I/O performance out of the box, this performance tin can diminish over time. Unlike a conventional hard drive, whatever write functioning made to an SSD is a ii-step procedure: a information cake must exist erased so written to. Plain if the drive is new and unused in that location volition exist nothing to erase and therefore the first step can be bypassed, but this only happens once unless the drive is trimmed.

Because this, we'll test how much functioning you can expect to lose from each SSD over time. We'll examine all drives in their make clean unused state, and then run the HD Tach full benchmark several times to fill the entire drive. This simulates heavy usage and clearly indicates of how performance will be affected later on normal long-term use.

All drives in this roundup support the Windows seven TRIM role, which is meant to counteract these negative effects.

SATA 6Gb/due south Organisation Specs
- Intel Cadre i7-2600K (LGA1155)
- x2 4GB DDR3-1600 G.Skill (CAS eight-8-viii-20)
- Asus P8P67 Deluxe (Intel P67)
- OCZ ZX Serial (1250w)
- Intel SSD 510 Series 120GB
- Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB
- OCZ Vertex 3 240GB
- Asus GeForce GTX 580 (1536MB)
Software
- Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit)
- Nvidia Forceware 270.51