Testing the SSD - Read Rate

     HD Tach is just one of a few tools that I like to use to benchmark and explore a hard drives performance. In the following benchmarks, the Toshiba and OCZ SSD drives were testing in the same notebook while the Raptor was tested in the desktop machine.  The following tests were accomplished READING data only.

Burst Rate

     I put the Raptors score on the bottom of the chart to give us a performance baseline. Keep in mind that the Raptor was tested in a desktop machine. The Toshiba managed to reach 36.7 Megabytes per second and was quickly passed by the OCZ SSD which hit 55.3 Megabytes / second. While most hard drives tend to drop off towards the end of the read cycle, the OCZ SSD maintained very close to 55 MB/s throughout the entire benchmark.

Access Time

     The Burst Speed stat is pretty unique to standard hard drives because it is being fed almost entirely by the hard drive's on board cache. Cache is used as the go-between for the hard disc drives own platter and the data bus. Data is passed from the platter and stored in cache until called upon again by the bus. The larger the hard drives buffer, the more data it can burst at one time. Since most solid state drives don't utilize a buffer, this stat can make the SSD's performance appear weaker when in reality it's just not that necessary for an SSD to have a large cache.

     Access time, usually expressed in milliseconds (ms), is a measure of the time it takes the drive to complete a task once the command has been issued. Generally, a 7200rpm drive has about 4.2ms of rotational latency that you would factor in when comparing the reported latency versus the manufacturer specification. In this instance, we are simply comparing the overall time of one unit versus another. The 10,000RPM Raptor seeks in nearly half the time of the 4200RPM Toshiba drive. Meanwhile the OCZ SSD could have performed the test 44 times before the raptor was finished.

      The data collected from HD Tach is nice, but its hardly a full spectrum of performance indicators. From here we'll move on to Intel's (aged but competent) IO Meter and then finally look at the results from the hard drive suite of Futuremark's PCMark Vantage.

Page 1:  Intro Page 2:  Up Close Page 3:  Testing (Part 1) Page 4:  Testing (Part 2) Page 5:  Testing (Part 3) Page 6:  Conclusion