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TEST BENCH AND PROTOCOL
Our analysis today will be conducted with our Z68 Extreme 7 Test Bench, full description of which can be found here.
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 ASRock (Z68 Extreme 7), Intel (Core i7-2600), Crucial (Ballistix), Corsair (H80), Be Quiet (PSU/Fans), and Fractal design (Define XL) for supporting the build of our Z68 Extreme 7 Test Bench.
BENCHMARK SOFTWARE
The software we will be using for todays analysis is typical of many of our reviews and consists of ATTO Disk Benchmark, Crystal DiskMark, AS SSD, Anvil Storage Utilities and PCMark Vantage. We rely on these as they each have a way of supporting one another yet, at the same time, adding a new performance benchmark to the total picture. Much of the software is free and can be downloaded simply by clicking on the linked title.
Crystal Disk Info provides some excellent information about the SSD itself to include its health, product information, power on information as well as the characteristics of the SSD. We can see that the SSD is capable of TRIM as it is not greyed out as with AAM.
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.
Specs list the 128GB C400 at 500MB/s read and 175MB/s write while our initial tests show both to be higher at 533MB/s read and 202MB/s write which is an excellent start.
Great review and information! These are great but just like conventional hard drives with rotating media, they can still fail (in different ways), where backing up data is still necessary to prevent the need for data recovery in the future. There are even some cases where if some of the memory chips fail that the data may not even be recoverable. Aside from that they are not susceptible to movement (shock) like conventional hard drives, weigh less and tend to use less power which can make them an ideal choice for notebook computing.
Where’s products with the new 88SS9187 controller that supports SATA 3.1?
Why the old 88SS9174 controller?
«128GB RAW total. Once formatted, the end user capacity is brought down a bit to 119GB.»
This statement is based on ignoring that the manufacturer quoted capacity is in gigabytes (10 to 9th power) and the one reported by MS-Windows is in gibibytes (2 to the 30th power), and in fact 128 gigabytes is roughly the same capacity is 119 gibibytes, or 128,000,000,000 bytes.
The raw capacity and the formatted capacity are reported to be the same 128GB=119GiB because the partitioning and formatting overheads are fairly small, that is well under 1.07GB=1.0GiB.
Same same different thread eheh. Lets be clear. This SSD contains 4 x 32GB modules for a raw total of 128 GB or gigabytes. Total available user capacity once it is formatted is119GB no matter how you cut it by trying to explain GB and GiB.
The use of Gib and, quite frankly the technical explanation and calculations, is not used on any review site that I am aware of and has no use but to confuse the reader needlessly.