I will be upfront with you as there have been many reviews, talks, articles, and retesting about all the new solid state drives and well I have pretty much come to the conclusion that it you want to give it a try, then do so. With them still being new to the market no one has really come up with the perfect way to test the drives and the claims that the companies have stated. Each site has there own testing methods and results, so Modders-Inc may be be thrown into the bunch as well. I will show you the test results, but I will also give you my real usage experience which I think at this point in time of SSD’s more important.
Using the hard drive testing software ATTO Disk Benchmark, which at one time was available from ATTO Technology that makes disk controllers. If you do an internet search will be able to find an older version out there somewhere…shhh….OK, you can download version 2.34 from us right here > ATTO Disk Benchmark
Using the software is easy and you see the testing being done in almost real time. Looking at the test below we can see that the drive preformed OK and has some decent write and read times.
Test of an IDE Hard Drive
Now when we jump over to the result of the Patriot Torqx we see that, well it just kick the a$% of the standard hard drive. In almost every result we see that the SSD drive just about doubled the performance.
Is the SSD faster than the IDE? Uh, heck yes! The read and write speeds just blow the IDE right out of the water. Another test using PCMark Vantage we can see that only did the SSD out perform the other drive in the HDD tests it also helped increase the overall score by leaps and bounds.
Testing the drive in PCMark Vantage we can see that the SSD increases the performance.
HD Tune is another good tool to use when test out you hard drive. Two benchmark results are available for your pleasure in the pro version and we will be testing my secondary drive on my i7 setup and then we will putting it up against the ever so fast Eee PC 1000HA. As we will see even on the low powered netbook the Patriot Torqx was able to beat the SATA drive in the read section, but probably do to the interface the write speeds did not fair as well.
SATA drive on my desktop PC
Installed into my Eee PC
I know some of you out there still like to use HD Tach so here is a screen shot for you to devour.
OK, screen shots just show images, how about something I can see? OK you got it! In the video below you will see my Eee PC 1000HA with Windows 7 RC1 installed on the SATA drive that came with it and anything that may try to start up with windows was turned off. In the second half of the video you will see the Patriot Torqx SSD installed and the same setup is used. The video is in real time.
I had purchased my ASUS Eee PC to take with me when I travel and I wanted to be able to have quick access to my files and to check emails, but as you could see in the video the performance of the Netbook was OK. I had opted for the SATA version as that it save me some money at the time and I was able to much more storage space. Well it was a goo thought at the time. So can I feel the difference with the SSD Drive? Yes I can. I noticed right away that programs loaded faster and responded quickly. Movies played of the drive seemed to be much more fluid and smooth. Web pages appear just a quickly as my i7 desktop and I found my self using the Eee PC much more, even when not traveling.
