Asus P8Z77-V Premium MotherBoard Equipped With Fully Functioning Lite-On mSATA SSD

SSD PERFORMANCE

Keeping in mind that this SSD is intended to be used as a caching solution and, even it were to be used as a regular OS drive, most would still experience a significant upgrade from a traditional hard drive, we thought we might throw in a test or two before we switch this off with a larger SATA 2 SSD.

ATTO DISK BENCHMARK VER. 2.46

ATTO Disk Benchmark is perhaps one of the oldest benchmarks going and is definitely the main staple for manufacturer performance specifications. ATTO uses RAW or compressible data and, for our benchmarks, we use a set length of 256mb and test both the read and write performance of various transfer sizes ranging from 0.5 to 8192kb. Manufacturers prefer this method of testing as it deals with raw (compressible) data rather than random (includes incompressible data) which, although more realistic, results in lower performance results.

Although no specifications can be found for this intended caching solution, performance of 284MB/s read and 93MB/s write is expected for such a low capacity SATA 2 SSD.

CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER. 3.0 X64

Crystal Disk Benchmark is used to measure read and write performance through sampling of raw (0/1 Fill/compressible) or random data which is, for the most part, incompressible. We are testing with Random or highly incompressible data samples for the M5S as this drive does not use compression in storage and test results are very similar regardless of the data sample in use, compressible or incompressible.

Crystal DiskMark shows similar and expands a bit with half decent 4k random writes for such a small SSD.

ANVIL STORAGE UTILITIES PROFESSIONAL (BETA)

You may not see this for long (and its definitely not common) but you get a freebee simply for reading!  Over the last little while, we have been assisting with beta besting new benchmark software called Anvil Storage Utilities which is an absolutely amazing SSD benchmarking utility.  Not only does it have a preset SSD benchmark, but also, it has included such things as endurance testing and threaded I/O read, write and mixed tests, all of which are very simple to understand and utilize in our benchmark testing.

Last but not least, ASU provides some decent disk access times, provides us with an idea of IOPS performance and also is great for SSD and system identification.