Super Talent Tera Nova 120GB SSD Review – First SSD Review of The New Year!

ATTO DISK BENCHMARK VER. 2.46

ATTO Disk Benchmark is perhaps one of the oldest benchmarks going and is definitely the main staple for manufacturer performance specifications. ATTO uses RAW or compressible data and, for our benchmarks, we use a set length of 256mb and test both the read and write performance of various transfer sizes ranging from 0.5 to 8192kb. Manufacturers prefer this method of testing as it deals with raw (compressible) data rather than random (includes incompressible data) which, although more realistic, results in lower performance results.

ATTO performance results of 544MB/s read and 511MB/s write are as close as you can get to the listed specs of 540MB/s and 510MB/s.

CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER. 3.0 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. Many new SandForce Driven SSD owners who cant wait to test the performance of their SSD often grab this program and run a quick test, not realizing that they are testing with incompressible data rather than compressible data used in testing by manufacturers.  We have provided compressible (oFill) results on the left with incompressible (random data) results on the right.

Our test results of the Tera Nova SSD with highly incompressible data (right) were expected and not something we might normally see in the Pro/enthusiast choice of SSDs we are seeing to date which typically contain synchronous or toggle mode NAND flash memory.  Such memory is capable of much better performance when transferring highly incompressible data such as music, videos and photographs.

Super Talents choice of asynchronous memory for this SSD will definitely provide a better price point when released, however, this also keeps the tera Nova just outside the reach of the Pro/enthusiest crowd who love their high incompressible data write performance.

STORAGE UTILITIES PROFESSIONAL

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.  Lets see how the Super Talent Tera Nova SSD does in Anvil testing.

Two definite positives of this test are the very quick response times (as advertised) as well as the 4k random write performance result of 79MB/s, both of which account for the visible upgrade one will see in their upgrade from a hard drive to a SSD.  A quick click will give you a larger view of these tests as well.