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THE SSD REVIEW TESTING PROTOCOL
At The SSD Review, we test our SSD’s slightly different depending upon the drive’s marketed purpose, that of a consumer or an enterprise focused SSD. For a consumer SSD, our goal is to test in a system that has been optimized with our SSD Optimization Guide, however, CPU C State alteration may or may not have occurred depending on the motherboard and BIOS configurations. Benchmarks for our consumer tests are that of fresh drives, so that we can verify that the manufacturer’s specifications match the SSD. Additionally, we also try to include links to the benchmarks used in our report so that you as the reader can replicate our tests to confirm that your SSD is top-notch.
SYSTEM COMPONENTS
This Test Bench build was the result of some great relationships and purchase; our appreciation goes to the below mentioned manufacturers for their support in our project. All of the components we use for testing and evaluation can be easily purchased at a relatively affordable price. The links provided below can assist in pricing, as well as availability for those of you who may find interest in our equipment.
| PC CHASSIS: | InWin 901 Mini-ITX Chassis |
| MOTHERBOARD: | ASUS P8H77-I Mini-ITX |
| CPU: | Intel i7 2600 CPU |
| CPU COOLER: | Corsair H80 CPU Cooler |
| POWER SUPPLY: | Cooler Master M2 Silent Pro 850W |
| SYSTEM COOLING: | Corsair Chassis Fan |
| MEMORY: | Crucial Ballistix Tactical Tracer 1600 |
| GRAPHICS CARD: | EVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti |
BENCHMARK SOFTWARE
The software used for today’s analysis is typical of many of our reviews and consists of ATTO Disk Benchmark, Crystal Disk Info, Crystal DiskMark, AS SSD, and PCMark Vantage. In consumer reports, we prefer to test with easily accessible software that the consumer can obtain, and in many cases, we even provide links. Our selection of software allows each to build on the last and to provide validation to results already obtained.
Crystal Disk Info is a great tool for displaying the characteristics and health of storage devices. It displays everything from temperatures, to the number of hours the device has been powered, and even to the extent of informing you of the firmware of the device.
Crystal Disk Info shows us that the Force LX SSD features the S.M.A.R.T. attribute, which allows for us to monitor the health of the SSD over its lifespan, as well as TRIM.
ATTO Disk Benchmark is a relatively easy-to-use benchmark tool, which happens to be the benchmark of choice for many manufacturers. ATTO uses compressible data rather than random data, which results in higher performance and thus, higher benchmark scores. In our testing, we have selected the transfer size to range from 0.5KB to 8192KB, and have set the total length of the test to be 256MB.
ATTO immediately shows us that the Force LX SSD performs quite well. Actually, it performed just as we expected with read speeds surpassing 560 MB/s and the write speeds coming in just below the listed write speeds at 298 MB/s.
This seems to be the best for those on a budget, thanks for the neat review!
These will still be a tough sell as long as dealers are still selling the older 32nm toggle NAND SandForce SSDs like the Mushkin Enhanced for the same price. Much higher P/E cycles and write speeds that are twice as fast.
We have numerous forum linkbacks that say different… I am reading a much higher than expected crowd stating they were finally making the jump and buying two drives very least.
I had Corsair 120GT which died, and i have change it for corsair 256gb LX, I can say that it is better than 120gb GT, better write speeds….