Super Talent TeraDrive Nova 240GB SATA 3 SSD Review

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.

Admittedly, the the write results were a bit lower than expected in ATTO, however, the high sequential read performance of 555MB/s is excellent.

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.

The performance with respect to the high sequential write transfer speeds was, once again, a bit lower than expected and the test results through testing of incompressible data on the right are as expected for a drive with asynchronous NAND flash memory.

As we had stated in our 120GB review of this drive, this choice of asynchronous NAND flash memory is an excellent choice for the value point of the drive, however, it may keep it out of the hands of some Pro users or enthusiasts.  For the most part, the performance will only be affected if moving large amounts of highly incompressible data such as we might see in photographs, videos and music, albeit, the visible affect will be very minimal.

ANVIL STORAGE UTILITIES PROFESSIONAL

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 TeraDrive Nova SSD does in Anvil testing:

This software has become my personal favorite because it provides so much of what evaluators are seeking within a single program.  Here we can see some excellent disk access speeds on the left (resp. time) along with an excellent result of 81,505 IOPS at 4k aligned random disk access.   A bit unusual is that the Anvil TOTAL score that we are seeing here is actually better than some drives with higher write scores we have shown in other reviews.