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ANVIL STORAGE UTILITIES PROFESSIONAL (BETA)
You may not see this for long (and its definitely not common) but you get a freebee simply for reading! 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.
Great Total Scores once are once again front and center for the extreme II, although the IOPS is a bit low. The basis of this result just might be the very low 4K and 4KQD4 disk response times.
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 simulations are as follows:
- Windows Defender In Use
- Streaming Data from storage in games such as Alan Wake which allows for massive worlds and riveting non-stop action
- Importing digital photos into Windows Photo Gallery
- Starting the Vista Operating System
- Home Video editing with Movie Maker which can be very time consuming
- Media Center which can handle video recording, time shifting and streaming from Windows media center to an extender such as XBox
- Cataloging a music library
- Starting applications
SANDISK EXTREME II SSD PCMARK VANTAGE PERFORMANCE
Once again, the SanDisk Extreme II has resulted in a very high PCMark Vantage HDD Suite Total Point Score of 73342 points with a high transfer speed of 426MB/s when testing in Windows Media Center. This places the Extreme II 480GB in sixth spot on the Vantage chart, leaving that former plateau of 70000 points, that was once so hard to reach, far behind.
Our PCMark Vantage Hierarchy below displays all SSDs that have exceeded the 70000 point mark plateau. The ranking is based solely on Vantage results and no other benchmarks are factored in, although most do appear to run very similar.
While looking at the photo of the opened unit and seeing the thermal pads I started thinking it might be interesting to do temperature measurements on SSDs to see just how hot they can run. Case surface temp checks would give an overall surface reading but it would be neat to see realtime color thermal imaging (via a Fluke thermal imager handgun or equivalent). You’d then be able to see which chips ran hotter than the others. It would solve the question of what generates the most heat, reads or writes? Sequential or random? Large or 4K? RAID 0 or RAID 5? Are there operations that can generate enough heat to cause damage or shorten the lifespan of the unit? Just my $.02 worth (before taxes).
Thanks you for the great review I like the way you go through the whole details of each SSD you review. This is an amazing Solid States Drive, fast like an blink of an eye. works great in my Macbook Pro 2012, Just one thing I have noticed, it when I leave my MBP and it goes in sleep and I come back and wake it up, it takes 20-30 delay, couldn’t find a solution for it, except shutting it down and turn it on again because it takes 12 Sec to boot up.