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BENCHMARK PROTOCOL AND THE TEST BENCH
This is The SSD Review Test Bench Number One. A quick click on the photo will give you a better look.
In testing, our main objective is to obtain results as pure and as accurate as possible and we want to ensure that no anomalies slip through. Simply put, we want to provide you with the absolute best results the tested hardware can provide. Repetition in testing is standard and, if necessary, we may conduct specific tests in Windows 7 safe mode to ensure the OS has little to no influence on the end result.
In order to validate and confirm our findings, testing is supported by industry accepted benchmark programs. All results are displayed through capture of the actual benchmark for better understanding of the testing process by the reader.
We would like to thank Gigabyte, Corsair, MSI, OCZ, and Fractal-Design, for sponsoring components of our Test Bench.
STORAGE MEDIUM
The hard drive that we will be utilizing for our testing is a Hitachi 320GB Sata 2 5400RPM HDD. This HDD is not new in any way and it’s best days are definitely behind it.
We felt this characteristic an important one as most people that purchase this caching solution will be utilizing a hard drive that has been in use for some time and most likely came with the system.
SOFTWARE AND BENCHMARK COMPOSITION
For today’s testing, we will be using ATTO Disk Benchmark, Crystal DiskMark, Anvil Storage Utilities, PCMark Vantage and we are even going to do some comparative testing in start times. In order to assist, we have supplied links in the titles of some of our favorite analysis software to encourage testing of your own as well.
INSTALLATION
Installation of the Corsair Accelerator is quick and easy and consists of installing the SSD in your desktop computer and downloading and installing NVELO Dataplex software. There is no need to reformat your system whatsoever.
There is a serial number located on the back of the Corsair Accelerator SSD and you will need to write this down as it is required for download of the caching software and installation. From there you simply follow the on screen instructions and reboot.
Our testing is going to follow a very simple process, whereby, we demonstrate the performance of the hard drive before and after it is cached with the Corsair Accelerator.
HDD
CACHED HDD
The read performance high prior to caching was 77MB/s whereas caching increased that to 283MB/s. Similarly, write performance started at a high of 76MB/s and increased to 257MB/s. NVELO Dataplex is already displaying HDD performance at the level of an SSD.
I’m intrigued. Migration is much easier than transferring OS and programs to a boot SSD drive, but I wonder what happens when things go wrong. The system crashes, power is interrupted at an inconvenient time, etc. Will a cache recover as gracefully as a dedicated SSD boot drive?
I thought I might test your theory and crashed my system in the middle of working as Dataplex is still installed. On reboot, it took a few seconds to validate the cache and all was back to normal. Unfortunately, I couldnt take a screen shot to display the procedure.
Thanks for the quick input. This may be the way to go. Not quite the performance of a boot drive, but ample for the kind of work I do … photo editing, etc.
Stop spreading those “observe, use timer stuff” for boot time. Use the event viewer id 100 for boot time. It’ll tell in extreme precision aka milli seconds
Understand your point, however, we like to keep our reviews very easy to understand and feel that the software use has ideal results and presentation for our reviews.
Thanks for the comment!
Hehe, softwares actually use the event viewer’s information. I know there is a program called bootracer. It uses event viewer. What else? Oh there is windows performance tool. It uses event viewer too.
What I want to tell is don’t be using timers to measure boot and shutdown time. Just in case if you don’t know, take your time and have a look.
https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/window-on-windows/use-windows-7-event-viewer-to-track-down-issues-that-cause-slower-boot-times/3253
Sure you didn’t mean to say that the software uses the same performace counters that are used by Event Viewer?
Les, do you think that the 30gb give near the same performance?
What would you chose between the Crucial Adrenaline running in SATA 2 and this one (60gb version)?
The Crucial Adrenaline is fully compatible in SATA 2 and both perform to their specs regardless of their size; the difference would be lifespan of the SSD which is still a very long time.
Still using the Accelerator in my system as I did the Adrenaline…both great caching solutions.
these look great but i wish they came in 128GB for longevity (less writes) and general purpose reasons, for me which is gaming… A few modern day mmos and FPS games would probably eat up 64GB fast
OCZ Synapse PricesType your reply…
Hi Les, just curious, would using a really fast SSD (e.g Intel 520 or something equivalent) and then using the corsair accelerator as a caching solution, drop your boot times further?
No that would not occur. The SSD alone will always be faster but we are talking seconds. The fastest full boot I have ever reached was 7 seconds whereas any NVELO caching solution can get to 14 seconds. IMHO, it would not be a financial viable alternative just to grab back those very few seconds.
AS well, the caching solution alone is not available as its own entity and all instances of caching sales have that software tied into the specific SSD so you could not simply exchange the SSD.
Thanks for the reply Les. Wow! A 7 sec boot! That’s pretty amazing. Was it from the time you switched the computer on to usability? What config were you using for that 7 sec boot?
Can still be done and it is from the press of the button to desktop usability. Many of done well with our Optimization Guide but, to reach this, maximum optimization is necessary.