SanDisk Extreme II 120 - 240 and 480 GB SSD review - SSD Performance File Copy tests

SSD Performance File Copy Tests

In this round of benchmarks we start off with our 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. 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 3GB worth files. We now measure how many seconds it takes to copy the files from the RAMDISK towards the storage unit tested today.

File copy write test  - compressed files

For the this 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).

** Small update, we listed Sandisk Extreme III in all charts, this should be Extreme SanDisk II

So we know that once we pass 16/32KB sizes, SSDs speed up almost exponentially. Hence we increased the total workload here towards 3 GB with 4272 compressed files in total, with a maximum files-size of 2MB. We drop all these MP3/JPG files onto the drive (copied from a RAMDISK) and measure the amount in seconds it takes for the storage unit to deal with it. Lower is obviously better. This SSD needs merely seconds to copy over 4000 files. As you can see, the SATA controller slowly but steadily is becoming a bottleneck. 6 Seconds is probably the best we'll ever achieve on this platform.

Performance Game load times

Here at Guru3D.com the audience is catered to gamers. And as such I like to start off with three real world performance game tests for a change.

We take the Alien Versus Predator benchmark and run it a couple of times. From the moment we click on the icon and load up the game to the moment the benchmark starts to run is what we are looking at for load time in seconds. As you can see, all top SSDs are however at 9 seconds, this is the fastest the system will go, yup... our X79 MSI with six core Core i7 3960X processor is becoming a bottleneck as well. See, now that is why synthetic benchmarks are developed. So let's have a look at a few of them.