Internals, Testing Methodology and System Setup
Internals:
The glaring difference with this new economical drive? Only 5 flash chips, which means only 5 of the 10 channels of the Intel controller are utilized.
Closer examination of the part numbers reveals this unit is actually a baby X25-M G2. The controller (PC29AS21BA0), RAM (48LC16M16A2), and flash (29F64G08CAMD1) is identical to that of the 80GB X25-M G2. And before you ask – yes, that is 34nm flash.
Specific for this review:
Single drive testing was done with our testbed in AHCI mode. RAID testing was done with the ICH10R set to RAID mode with the IMSM (Intel Matrix Storage Manager) software installed and write-back caching enabled at the driver level. All values will be obtained under XP X64 to keep the test data consistent with previous testing. Windows 7 was not required for these tests because the V Series does not employ TRIM-enabled firmware (it is based loosely on the Intel ‘G1’ revision controller firmware at present, but Kingston has stated they may release a TRIM enabled firmware at a future date).
Testing Methods
Our tests are a good mix of synthetic and real-world benchmarks. PCMark, 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
We have switched our testbed over to a more dedicated, forward thinking machine. We made some changes to help minimize test data scatter with higher bandwidth devices. Sound is flat out disabled, with no additional card installed. Video was *intentionally* shifted to a PCI unit to free up both PCIe-16 slots for testing tandem pairs of PCI Express cards (like ioDrives, DDRDrives, and high end RAID cards). Spot checks against the previous rig showed a negligible change in test output.
PC Perspective would like to thank ASUS, Corsair, and BFG for supplying some of the components of our test rig.
| Hard Drive Test System Setup | |
| CPU | Intel Core i7 920 @ 4 GHZ (HT disabled) |
| Motherboard | Asus P6T |
| Memory | Corsair Dominator 6GB DDR3-1600 |
| Hard Drive | G.Skill 32GB SLC SSD |
| Sound Card | N/A |
| Video Card | BFG Geforce 8400 GS 512MB PCI |
| Video Drivers | Geforce 181.22 |
| Power Supply | Corsair CMPSU-650TX |
| DirectX Version | DX9.0c |
| Operating System | Windows XP X64 SP2
|
- PCMark05
- Yapt
- IOMeter
- HDTach
- HDTune
- PCPer File Copy Test
