An SSD Upgrade Story with the Corsair 128GB Drive

Testing Methodology and System Setup

Testing Methods

Our storage testing hardware remains unchanged and is more than capable of putting the stress on these standard and solid state drives necessary for proper benchmarking.  We are using a Core 2 Duo E6400 processor on a Gigabyte P35 motherboard that uses the ICH9 south bridge.  The OS of choice is Windows Vista x64 SP1.  The rest of the components are listed in the table below.


Our tests are a good mix of synthetic and real-world benchmarks.  The two PCMark suites offer a good combination of both worlds while the IOMeter, HDTach, HDTune, Yapt and our custom File Copy test round out the selection to cover just about all bases.  If you have any questions about our tests just drop into the Storage Forum and we’ll help you out!

Test System Setup

The Corsair 128GB SSD was tested against the best of the best in both the world of spindle-based HDDs and SSDs; it was pitted against the updated 300GB VelociRaptor 10,000 RPM hard drive as well as a RAID-0 configuration using a pair of the drives.  I also included an older 150GB Raptor X hard drive.  The opposing SSDs include the new OCZ Summit, OCZ Apex, Intel X25-M 80GB drive, an older OCZ Samsung-based drive and the SuperTalent MX series 60GB drive. 

Hard Drive Test System Setup
CPU	Intel Core 2 Duo E6400
Motherboard	Gigabyte P35-DS3R
Memory	OCZ Technology 2 x 2GB DDR2-800
Hard Drive	Corsair 128GB SSD OCZ Summit 250GB SSD OCZ Apex 250GB SSD Intel X25-M 80GB SSD OCZ 64GB SSD SATA-II Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB WD3000GLFS Western Digital Raptor 150GB
Sound Card	none
Video Card	ATI Radeon X800 XL
Video Drivers	Catalyst 8.3
Power Supply	Antec TruePower 480 watt
DirectX Version	DX10
Operating System	Windows Vista x64 SP1

• PCMark Vantage
• Yapt
• PCPer File Copy Test