Silicon Power Extreme E25 128GB Review

TESTING SYSTEM AND METHODOLOGY

Since the Silicon Power E25 is a SATA 2.0 device, native Intel ports were used on the ASROCK Z68 EXTREME4 motherboard, with updated Intel RST drives of 10.8.0.1003. In addition, only stock firmware was available for the 128GB Silicon Power Extreme E25 SSD.

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.

Real-world benchmarks included a batch of files and folders with capacities of 250MB, 500MB, and 1000MB respectively to test file transfer performance. Windows 7 boot times were also monitored and timed starting from the OS load screen to Steams login window (the last program to load).

For consistency, each test was run three times for the DRAM cache to kick in, utilizing AHCI as the storage mode. The average of all three was taken as the final result. Note that once installed, the total size shows up as roughly 119GB.

ATTO DISK BENCHMARK VER. 2.47

The ATTO Disk Benchmark measures storage performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. ATTO is rated to test RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives.

ATTO scores are about what we should expect from a SATA 2.0 drive of this calibre. The specifications noted by Silicon Power indicate that the drive should saturate full SATA 2.0 read speeds (roughly 275mb/s) which are achieved, but a write speed of 240MB/s is decent at best.

CRYSTALDISKMARK X64 VER. 3.0.1c

CrystalDiskMark is a disk benchmark utility that measures performance for sequential and random reads/writes of various sizes for any storage device. It is useful for comparing the speed of both portable and local storage devices.

CDM reveals pretty much the same as the ATTO benchmark. We should expect to see close to 275MB/s read and 240 MB/s write. 4k random speeds are passable, but should be a lot better.