Internals, Testing Methodology and System Setup
Internals:
Four screws and we’re in. The enclosure top is stamped while the bottom is a cast alloy.
The familiar 10-channel layout of the Intel SSD (with their own controller).
More flash at the rear, bring the flash chip count to 20. This works out to 16GB/chip for the 300GB model.
Here’s the controller in all its glory.
Here we find 64MB of Hynix RAM surrounded by a hefty amount of capacitance.
These caps act in a similar fashion to the SuperCAP present on enterprise-grade Vertex series SSD’s.
These caps act in a similar fashion to the SuperCAP present on enterprise-grade Vertex series SSD’s.
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’re breaking in a new SandyBridge testbed. Necessary for properly testing these new drives, even with the known issues. To get around this, we are using only the Intel SATA 6Gb/sec ports, which are known to not exhibit the inconsistent performance / connectivity issues.
PC Perspective would like to thank ASUS, Corsair, and Kingston for supplying some of the components of our test rig.
Notes specific to this review
We included data from the Micron C300 for comparison – but that data was obtained under the previous testbed’s ICH10R controller. This was done primarily due to very odd performance seen when testing under the Marvell SATA 6Gb/sec controller. We will be revisiting the C300 with newer firmware, testing it under the SandyBridge native SATA 6Gb/sec controller along with a backfill retest of our other samples.
PCMark05
Yapt
IOMeter
HDTach
HDTune
PCPer File Copy Test
| Hard Drive Test System Setup | |
| CPU | Intel Core i5-2500K |
| Motherboard | Asus P8P67 Deluxe |
| Memory | Kingston HyperX 4GB DDR3-2133 CL9 |
| 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 7 X64 |
