SSD Performance PCMark Vantage HDD
PCMark Vantage HDD test suite
PCMark vantage has a very good test suite to benchmark storage performance. The software will look at items you normally do with your PC and tries to measure what kind of an effect that has on your user experience by testing eight different segments stressing the storage unit.
| HDD1 | Windows Defender |
| HDD2 | Gaming |
| HDD3 | Import Pictures |
| HDD4 | Windows Vista startup |
- HDD1 - Spyware is very common on systems without protection against it, letting Windows Defender scan & protect your system is recommended.
- HDD2 - Streaming data from an HDD in games allows for massive worlds and riveting non-stop action.
- HDD3 - Importing digital photos to Windows Photo Gallery is where a high performance HDD shines.
- HDD4 - Starting Windows Vista is a rather demanding task for the storage device, but a fast HDD will notably decrease the loading time.
The tests include a series of reads, writes and copies under a set of specific conditions and applications.
Now first off have a very good look at the two blue lines, these are traditional drives with on top the Velociraptor, these are totally trashed by the SSD drives.
The X128 for whatever reason is faster than the Vertex, we do need to check out the Vertex with the new 1.40 firmware though, which has garbage cleaning which will improve drive performance.
Spanning them all though is the Samsung based P128. We strongly feel that the bigger 128MB cache that drive has is responsible for that.
Let's fire up the second round of real-world performance tests:
| HDD5 | Video editing |
| HDD6 | Media Center |
| HDD7 | Media Player Music Adding |
| HDD8 | Application loading |
- HDD5 - Home video editing with Windows Movie Maker can be very time-consuming unless you have a high performance HDD.
- HDD6 - Windows Media Center with a high performance HDD can handle simultaneous video recording, time-shifting, and streaming to an Extender for Windows Media Center, such as Xbox 360.
- HDD7 - Cataloguing your music library is a breeze for fast and powerful HDDs.
- HDD8 - Starting various applications can take a long time unless you have a high performance HDD.
n the past test 5 (video editing) and test 6 (MCE) we noticed the traditional mechanical Raptor drive lead the pack due to small file writing like little thumbnails and such. However, here's where the big 64MB/128MB caches on the new generation SSDs kick in so darn hard.
The dynamic changes here, though the P128 still kicks butt, the Vertex and X128 going first base with each other.
