Super Talent TeraDrive CT3 120GB SATA 3 SSD Review – An Amazing ‘SandForce Driven’ ASync 6Gbps SSD

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.

Our ATTO testing provided high sequential disk access performance results of 550MB/s read and 490MB/s write which aren’t that far off of the listed specifications of 545MB/s read and 510MB/s write.

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 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. The following results will show 0Fill data (compressible) on the left with random data sample results (incompressible) on the right.

Our results in Crystal DiskMark testing are an excellent representation of the price/performance trade off we spoke to at the beginning of this report.  The results to the right show that, when testing relatively incompressible data such as movies, photographs and music, performance is significantly lower.  This, IN NO WAY, affects your viewing of or listening to any of these entertainment media; it simply takes a bit longer to transfer such files, AND ONLY IMPORTANT, if you, for some reason, are continuously moving large amounts of movies, pictures and music on a frequent basis.

If thats the case, you just might want to take a look at the Super Talent PT3 SSD.

ANVIL 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. Recently, we published the exclusive public release here and, if you happen to check it out, there is a FREE download of the software! Lets see how the Super Talent TeraDrive CT3 120GB SSD fares on the Anvil Pro:

Although our high sequential results were a bit lower than expected, the 4KQD16 result of 80,913 IOPS was very impressive as was the 4K random write score of 91MB/s which confirmed that of the Crystal result of 95MB/s above.  With high 4k random writes such as this, we are definitely going to see great PCMark Vantage tests and maybe even a shock or two in its overall placement amongst the pack.