64GB SSD on the Desktop: Samsung and OCZ go mainstream

Test Setup

DVNation provided the latest Memoright MR25.2-032S GT drive for comparison in our HD Tune tests. This drive features 120/120 MB/s read/write specifications and with a total of eight of these drives on-hand, we will have a special RAID performance article shortly. We will also update this article with results from this drive in the near future; in the meantime, we are using the Mtron 32GB SSD for application benchmark comparisons as it features specifications near the Samsung/OCZ offerings.

Our testbed uses an MSI HD 3870 video card to ensure that our graphics benchmarks are not GPU bound. Our video tests are run at 1280x1024 at High Quality settings. All of our tests run in an enclosed case with a dual optical/hard drive setup to reflect a moderately loaded system platform. We fully patch the OS and load a clean drive image for each platform in order to make sure that driver conflicts are minimal.

We format before each test run and complete five tests on each drive in order to ensure consistency in the benchmark results. We remove the high and low scores and report the remaining score. The Vista swap file is set to a static 2048MB and we clear the prefetch folder after each benchmark.

Software Test Suite

With the variety of disk drive benchmarks available, we need a means of comparing the true performance of the hard drives in real world applications. Our abbreviated benchmark suite for today's article will include:

• HD Tune
  
• Thermals
  
• WinRAR
  
• Nero Recode
  
• Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts
  
• Crysis
  
• PCMark Vantage

Our benchmark suite is suited for desktop applications. Our next installment will feature a notebook-oriented suite.