Monster Digital 400GB Le Mans SSD Review – Monster Enters The SSD Arena With Style

CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER 3.0.1 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.

The results are very impressive for a SSD with such high capacity. The results to the left are with easily compressible data, and the result to the right are with the default data test used by Crystal Disk Mark, which is incompressible. With the onboard LSI SandForce using compression for part of its speed advantage, we can see that there are a bit lower results with the incompressible data.

AS SSD BENCHMARK VER 1.64

Up until recently, AS SSD was the only benchmark created specifically for SSD testing and it uses incompressible data. Many enthusiasts like to benchmark with AS SSD for their needs.  AS SSD, for the most part, gives us the worst case scenario in SSD transfer speeds because of its use of incompressible data and many enthusiasts like to use AS SSD for their needs. Transfer speeds are displayed on the left with IOPS results on the right.

The Le Mans scores very well with 526 MB/s in sequential read and 307 MB/s with sequential write in the AS SSD incompressible benchmark. The latency for reads is superb, at .06, with the writes being a bit higher. The high Queue Depth random results may seem a little low to the untrained eye, but higher capacity SSDs always have a bit lower performance with the high QD random, so these are expected values.

With the compression benchmark that is included in the AS SSD suite we can see the performance of the Monster Le Mans and how it scales amongst the various levels of compressibility of the data that is presented to it. The write speed is where we see the greatest performance variability during use, with the peak reaching into the 500 MB/s range with 100% compressible data.

ANVIL STORAGE UTILITIES PROFESSIONAL

Over the last little while, we have been assisting with beta testing 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.

First we look to the fully compressible test. The read latency at QD1 shows as .1, higher than with AS SSD. The write latency at QD1 is reported lower, with .1168ms. The overall score of 3524 is very good for such a large capacity SSD.The incompressible data test shows much lower scores, particularly in the write scoring. The write speeds with all SandForce drives tends to be very low overall with incompressible data. With compressible data of various percentages, there will be differing speeds attainable.