Our SSD Reviews

A few weeks ago, The SSD Review scored the webs first review of a newly announced ‘super capacity’ SSD by Super Talent, the Ultra MX 480GB SSD. What we failed to mention was that we had to make a bit of a ‘deal with the devil‘ in order to grab that internet exclusive, the devil being Super Talents Director of Marketing Peter …

You truly know that your a computer geek when you hollar “Woot” to your first RAID results and have to call up the wife and kids to see.  Quite frankly I don’t think I will ever forget the look of confusion on her face as much as she won’t forget the look of amazement on mine.  She felt a bit …

TRIM IN RAID AND CRUCIAL REALSSDs Before we start, we need to give ample warning that TRIM does not work in RAID.  The most recent release of Intels RST package is 9.6.0.1014. Crucial C300 SSDs are ideal for RAID, more so than the competition, because they have very aggressive garbage collection, or ITGC, which works in a similar fashion to …

10.  Enable Write Caching on Device and Turn Off Write Cache Buffer Flushing. This particular point made the largest difference in performance as you will see. Press the Win7 Start Orb; Left Click ‘Computer’ Right Click on Your RAID Drive; Select Properties; Select Hardware; Double Click on Your RAID volume; Click on Policies; and Check Both Boxes. Take a look …

Crucial C300 256GB RealSSDx2 in RAID0 (16K Stripe) . . . . . . . . . . . . . We left the two true Crucial RAID tests until last to show how great these Crucial drives really are.  Installation for these 256GB drives took 9 minutes and 10 seconds and the boot time is simply amazing at just …

CONCLUSIONS EASE OF INSTALLATION AND PERFORMANCE The two things that can truly be said about experimenting with RAID0 this past weekend are that it is quick and easy and the performance boost that you see in the typical desktop is absolutely amazing. The only reason that we spent so many hours experimenting was to fine tune and show you how …

It was just a few days back that Corsair announced the news of their upcoming release of the F90 and F180 solid state drives, both member of their Force Series of SSDs with capacities of 90 and 180GB respectively. We found a very interesting bit of information in this release that seems to run along the same course of many …

TEST BENCH, SOFTWARE AND PROTOCOL TEST BENCH CONFIGURATION Motherboard Asus Rampage III Gene SATA 6Gb/s USB3 CPU Intel i7-930 CPU@2.80Ghz (OCd to 3.2Ghz) RAM 6Gb G.Skill 1600 Triple Channel Graphics MSI N460GTX DDR5 768MB Power Supply OCZ ModXStream-Pro 600w CPU Cooler Cooler Master Hyper 212+ OS Windows 7 64 Bit Ultimate Wifi Belkin Surf & Share Wireless USB Adapter Monitor …

2. Crystal Diskmark x64 ver. 3.0 (oFill) We were discussing the importance of the 4kb random writes earlier and the result of 59MB/s here is an excellent result.  For a better understanding of this, one of our most popular articles, ‘The Manufacturers Bluff’, is linked and discusses the imnportance of the 4kb random performance results in comparison to the coveted …

The SSD Review uses benchmark software called PCMark Vantage x64 HDD Suite to create testing scenarios that might be used in the typical user experience.  There are eight tests in all and the tests performed record the speed of data movement in MB/s to which they are then given a numerical score after all of the tests are complete.  The …