The system and software
For testing Solid State drives we use the LSI MegaRAID 9265-8i RAID controller card. This provides seamless interaction between single and multidrive testing and allows platform agnostic results to be given. Additional testing was performed with the onboard SATA 6 Gbps controller of the SB950.
- ASUS Sabertooth 990FX Motherboard
- AMD FX-4100 Quad Core Bulldozer
- 8GB Corsair EVO 1866 9-10-9 DDR3
- EVGA 580GTX Superclock
- Corsair TX-750 PSU
- Western Digital 1TB Greenpower drive for OS
- Cooler Master 212+ Heatsink
- Custom Built Bench Station
For gauging performance the following software is used.
- ATTO Disk Benchmark
- Crystal DiskMark X64
- PCMark Vantage
- AIDA64 Storage Read and Write Tests
The LSI card is set up as single drive RAID0, with disabled read ahead and Direct IO write methods to bypass cache performance. Cluster size is set to NTFS default or 4KB for single drive performance testing.
Clean tests are performed multiple times with secure erase in between. First on AMD then on the LSI MegaRAID card. Fill tests are performed a single run through each bench after filling the drive. The Vertex 4 128 GB was filled to 55% full. Normally in testing we fill this to 60% but due to unforeseen copy issues with a storage drive had to stop at the 55% mark. The fill tests finish with AIDA write tests which destroy the partition. A quick format and reboot and a single run of all tests once more in the order of ATTO, CDM, PCMark and then AIDA Read and Write. Covers worst case dirty performance.
1 Comment
Try using the latest AMD AHCI drivers with the Vertex 4. I have a Phenom II X4 955 with a Vertex 4 128GB SSD and the AMD drivers doubled the lower ATTO scores compared to the Microsoft AHCI drivers.