ATTO
This has been proven to be an extremely handy program that seems to provide more realistic benchmarks while breaking down 4K up to 8.1MB data block performance. It offers about as close to a real world data transfer rates as can be expected while using a 256MB file while utilizing any Disk Caching capabilities. Overlapping Input/Ouput was enabled to challenge the storage drives.
First up are the results of a Seagate 500GB SATAII drive. Naturally, these drives aren’t going to produce any big numbers unless they’re in a RAID configuration. Having it here does give you an idea of performance of under 1TB capacity drives. We should have some 1TB results to include in our next round of testing to hopefully give our platters a fighting chance.
Here, you can see an entry level Kingston 128GB V-Series SSD in action. The results here are almost double the write rate and more than double the read rates of the Seagate 500GB SATAII platter based drive. Here we can see some of the small block write limitations of this budget SSD offering.
And finally, you can see the excellent performance one can expect from their ever so capable TorqX SSD. You can also see that the TorqX doesn’t suffer from any low small data block transfer rate issues that seemed to plague some older SSD. The Indilinx controller does a much more efficient job of directing the SSD’s performance.
QuickBench
I’ve found QuickBench to be a simple, yet thorough program that’s capable of providing realistic Sequential and Random R/W performance. It can test larger mid-range 20MB to 100MB file transfer rates as well as break down data block performance. Since this particular benchmark is cross platform between Mac and PC, you’ll see it pop up in our testing with Apple products. This allows us to do some meaningful comparison with similar drives.
Before testing, Disk Caching was disabled to eliminate any discrepancies associated with chipset and controller performance. When enabled, you can expect about a 10% performance gain depending on your particular system.
Again, first on the chopping block, the screenshot from our badly beaten Seagate Barracude SATA II drive. It shows pretty standard performance that’s expected especially in the Random R/W rates. Depending on your particular hard drive, the results may be higher by a few MB/s as there is always a tiny bit of variance between mechanical drives.