Random Read/Write Speed

This test reads/writes 4KB in a completely random pattern over an 8GB space of the drive to simulate the sort of random access that you'd see on an OS drive (even this is more stressful than a normal desktop user would see). I perform three concurrent IOs and run the test for 3 minutes. The results reported are in average MB/s over the entire time.

I've had to run this test two different ways thanks to the way the newer controllers handle write alignment. Without a manually aligned partition, Windows XP executes writes on sector aligned boundaries while most modern OSes write with 4K alignment. Some controllers take this into account when mapping LBAs to page addresses, which generates additional overhead but makes for relatively similar performance regardless of OS/partition alignment. Other controllers skip the management overhead and just perform worse under Windows XP without partition alignment as file system writes are not automatically aligned with the SSD's internal pages.

First up is my traditional 4KB random write test, each write here is aligned to 512-byte sectors, similar to how Windows XP might write data to a drive:

Update: Random write performance of the drive we reviewed may change with future firmware updates. Read here to find out more.

4KB Random Write - MB/s

Again, we have the Force and Vertex LE running shoulder to shoulder. The situation doesn't change at all when we look at 4K aligned writes (similar to how Windows 7/OS X 10.5/6 would behave):

4K Aligned - 4KB Random Write - MB/s

4KB Random Read - MB/s

Random read speed rounds out our tests and shows us no difference between the SF-1200 and earlier SF-1500 derived SSDs.

Sequential Read/Write Speed Overall System Performance using PCMark Vantage
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  • Carleh - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - link

    Thanks for the tip, I'll try it.
  • bstowe94 - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - link

    Yes the idea of using the print to read the whole article at once is quite nice. I will be doing this from now on.
  • therealnickdanger - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - link

    It's also very nice for bathroom breaks. Some men read the paper. I read AT!
  • dgz - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - link

    That's what I do.

    You can also to this in Chrome and Opera, too.
  • Spivonious - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - link

    Remember that the Print view doesn't have banner ads. That's the major source of revenue for this site, so I doubt Anand is going to make the Print view more attractive for on-screen reading.
  • nsiboro - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - link

    ... then insert a few adverts between pages, I personally don't mind. AT can feed me Ads and Tech, anytime!
  • chrnochime - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - link

    Hate to break it to you but not everything in life can be bent to your pleasing.
  • Carleh - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - link

    Before redesign, print layout used to have margins, so it's not really "bending to my pleasing", I'm not asking for something new.

    BTW, what's the point of your comment?
  • mariush - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - link

    File > Print Preview > Page Setup > Margins & Header/Footer

    Set the values you're comfortable width and print.

    No need to mess with the site for such things.
  • nilepez - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - link

    The site makes money based on either ad views or ad clicks. Clearly, they'll get less of both if everyone reads the text on a single page that has no ads.

    I was going to suggest page zipper (FF plugin), but it doesn't work with this site, and even if it did, since they have feed back directly below each page, you'd have to get through every singe post to get to scroll to the next page (rinse/repeat for each page of text).

    I think it'd be smarter for Anand to put the feed back after the last page and setup pages to work with page zipper.....we get a single page with all the text, but we also see all of the adds.

    With that said, I don't really mind the current set.

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