Mach Xtreme DS Turbo 120GB SSD review - SSD Performance RW File Copy tests

SSD Performance RW File Copy tests

In this round of benchmarks we start off with our two latest additions in our test suite, real-world file copy tests. Currently certain controllers benefit from compressed files, while others don't. Certain storage units hate small files, others work well with it. So it only makes sense to do some manual tests on that.

File copy write test  - The Guru3D CHOKE test with uncompressed files.

Any storage unit's nightmare, whether that is an HDD or SSD, is storing really small files as fast as possible. So on our Test PC we created a RAMDISK partition (we can't use an SSD/HDD here as it would be a bottleneck) in which we install roughly 500MB worth of text files, highly compressible. We now measure how many seconds it takes to copy the files from the RAMDISK towards the storage unit tested today.

The crucial factor here is that we copy many small files that can be compressed. But we made the files so small that the file-system will simply choke up. Make no mistake, this test is ridiculous. Over time results will build up of course.

So in the above chart we take 0,52 GB of random text files sized from just merely bytes (the vast majority) up-to 250KB. In total copy queues up over 113,586 files in this test, and these are being copied from the RAMDISK towards the storage unit in the number of minutes shown above. Lower is obviously better.

Now the bottleneck is the file-system and this test is bizarre (you basically drag a hundred-thirteen-thousand miniscule files and drop them onto the storage solution). The difference will be marginal, even compared to HDDs as NAND based flash solutions behave very similar.

File copy write test  - Slightly larger compressed files.

For the second real world file-copy test we take compressed data, like small JPG and MP3 files. We have them in random sizes from less than one KB up-to slightly larger 2MB files to emulate MP3 copying better (which most of you can relate to a notch better).

So we know that once we pass 16/32KB sizes, SSDs really haul ass and speed up exponentially. Hence we increased the workload here towards 3 GB with 4272 compressed files in total, with a maximum files-size of 2MB. We drop a little over 4000 MP3/JPG files onto the the drive, copied from the RAMDISK and measure the amount in seconds it takes for the storage unit to deal with it. Again, the files are being copied from the RAMDISK in the amount of seconds you see above towards the tested storage unit, lower is obviously better.