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THE SSD REVIEW TESTING PROTOCOL
At The SSD Review, we test our flash drives slightly different depending upon the drive’s marketed purpose, that of a consumer or an enterprise focused drive. For a consumer drive, our goal is to test in a system that has been optimized with our SSD Optimization Guide, however CPU C State alteration may or may not have occurred depending on the motherboard and BIOS configurations. Benchmarks for our consumer tests are that of fresh drives, so that we can verify that the manufacturer’s specifications match the drive. Additionally, we also try to include links to the benchmarks used in our report so that you as the reader can replicate our tests to confirm that your drive is top-notch.
SYSTEM COMPONENTS
This Test Bench build was the result of some great relationships and purchase; our appreciation goes to the below mentioned manufacturers for their support in our project. All of the components we use for testing and evaluation can be easily purchased at a relatively affordable price. The links provided below can assist in pricing, as well as availability for those of you who may find interest in our equipment.
| PC CHASSIS: | Cooler Master CM Strom Stryker Chassis |
| MOTHERBOARD: | ASUS P8Z77-V Premium Motherboard |
| CPU: | Intel i7 3770K CPU |
| CPU COOLER: | Corsair H100 CPU Cooler |
| POWER SUPPLY: | be quiet! Dark power Pro 850W |
| SYSTEM COOLING: | be quiet! Silent Wings 2 Chassis Fan |
| MEMORY: | Crucial Ballistix Dual Channel DDR3 Memory |
| GRAPHICS CARD: | N/A |
BENCHMARK SOFTWARE
The software used for today’s analysis is typical of many of our reviews and consists of Piriform Speccy, ATTO Disk Benchmark, Crystal DiskMark, AS SSD, and QuickBench. In consumer reports, we prefer to test with easily accessible software that the consumer can obtain, and in many cases, we even provide links. Our selection of software allows each to build on the last and to provide validation to results already obtained.
PIRIFORM SPECCY
Piriform Speccy is a great tool for checking the status and health of your computer system. It provides you with brief summary, or a detailed look, at your operating system, CPU, RAM, motherboard, graphics, storage, optical drives, audio, peripherals and network.
With Speccy we can see that the Silicon Power Marvel M70 has a usable capacity of 117 GB, with a real size of 126 GB, further that this drive is also formatted in exFAT.
ATTO Disk Benchmark is a relatively easy-to-use benchmark tool, which happens to be the benchmark of choice for many manufacturers. ATTO uses compressible data rather than random data, which results in higher performance and thus, higher benchmark scores. In our testing, we have selected the transfer size to range from 0.5KB to 8192KB, and have set the total length of the test to be 256MB.
With our first benchmark test, ATTO brings us our test scores utilizing compressible data. The Marvel M70 returned read scores reaching 226 MB/s and write scores reaching 61 MB/s. Comparing to our listed scores, the write speeds are about half what we expected to reach, where as the read is almost reaching its mark. What is interesting is the jump in write speed at the 64 KB mark, with the sudden drop in write speeds right afterwards.
CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER. 3.0.3 x64
Crystal Disk Benchmark is visually straightforward, and is used for measuring the speeds at which your storage device reads and writes in both compressible (0Fill/1Fill) and random, mostly incompressible, data. Random data is more consistent with everyday use of a computer, such as transferring videos, pictures and music. We run the benchmark twice, using oFill data first, and then proceeding to test with random data.
With Crystal Disk Mark we see that using 0Fill data the read speed reaches 220 MB/s and the write speed reaches 69 MB/s. When we switch over to random data, we see an interesting, but slight, jump in read speed to 233 MB/s, where as the write speed stays the same.
AS SSD Benchmark uses incompressible data in their testing of SSDs, essentially providing results that would be consistent with using the heaviest workload, thus lower speeds are expected. Transfer speeds (MB/s) are seen in the left picture below and IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) are on the right.
In AS SSD, we see that the Marvel M70 reaches 234 MB/s with read speeds and 79 MB/s with write speeds. When taking a look at the IOPS, the Marvel M70 comes back with 14 and 4 IOPS, respectively.
QUICKBENCH VER. 4.0
QuickBench is another benchmark tool used to measure the transfer speeds and performance of storage devices. QuickBench is a good tool for confirming the previously produced read and write speeds seen above.
QuickBench always proves to be integral to our analysis of a drive, as it typically shows us things we don’t normally expect from a drive. With QuickBench, the Marvel M70 returns write speeds reaching as high as 87 MB/s and read speeds reaching up to 197 MB/s. This is the first time we have seen the Marvel M70 exceed its listed write speed.
i have this flash memory
coteroller is phison ps2251-03
flash nand is toshiba mlc
and this flash is very good
Thanks for that. Can you check if flash is TLC or MLC ?
Pro tip:
You guys at tssr should use chipgenius for every flash product you review. It gives out controller and flash information, which is always a nice thing to know 🙂
this flash memory speed is between 60 untill 70 mbps so TLC can not give this speed by ps2251-03 and ithink for usb memory conteroller phison and siliconmotion and etron is better than another conteroller
Sure it can. Actually, 60–70MB/s is pretty low for 128GB MLC.
You can always check with chipgenius to be sure.
oh yes this softwar is very good
this is finaly result
Chip Vendor: Phison
Chip Part-Number: PS2251-03(PS2303) – F/W 01.12.10 [2014-08-26]
Flash ID Code: 8984643C – Intel [MLC]
One reason to choose write speed over capacity (and flashy looks) is that a 16MB Drive with very fast write speeds will hold an entire Operating System (like a ‘Rescue Disk’, BackTrack, or even a Linux Server).
For Photos you may want a huge capacity, for video you certainly will.
If you want to use the Drive as an Operating System’s Boot Drive (or even to run a Program installed on the Drive, that writes to the Drive) then write speed is your friend (what you seek).
The Drives with the high cost (and write speed) are RAID Drives (and thus that explains the lower capacity) and some feature FIPS encryption and Fingerprint Scanner (for U$200, like the ;Imation Defender F200 Biometric 16GB Model 27817′). There are even WiFi USB Flash Drives (in case you’re too lazy to pull it out of your Pocket and plug it in). Some of these fancy Drives (from ‘Big Name’ Mfgs.) are less than U$50 (for 16MB); a worthwhile investment in coolness if not security.
You Review the “Supertalent USB 3.0 Express Dram?Disk” here: https://www.thessdreview.com/featured/supertalent-usb-3-0-express-dram-disk-review/ — You Article says this about that Drive:
” It is available in capacities of 8, 16 and 32GB and Amazon pricing now reflects prices of $12, $18 and $56. Advertised performance is 5388MB/s read and 4041MB/s write, but we have reached performance speeds well above that in our benchmark software.”.
With that Drive you can load an OS onto it and use it to boot a Computer, with the result that it will run faster than it did on it’s native Drives.
Paying extra to get write speed in this format (style, type) of Drive makes sense. It is for “SD Cards” (for Cameras) that you need only pay for enough speed to suit your Camera’s data rate, and would probably benefit from increased capacity.
I can load VMWare and a couple of OSes on a 32GB Drive with room to spare, never needed a larger Drive but always wanted a faster one (especially for random write speed).