Product Features

Look at that fancy box, brushed aluminium effect cardboard, oh yea.

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The drive itself is pretty bland looking, but nobody is buying an SSD because it looks cool.

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Popping open the casing and voiding the warranty, we get a view at the internal chips that are used. The memory are Toshiba branded and the controller is Marvel; more specifically, the Marvell 88SS9174. In general drives with Sandforce controllers have been giving slightly better performance outputs than this one, but let’s not judge this SSD by its cover.

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Test Rig

CPU: Intel i5 2500k @ 3.5ghz (the lowest the turbo multi would allow)
Motherboard: Asus P8P67 LE
RAM: 4GB Generic DDR3 1600MHZ
GPU: Zotac GTX 560 TI
PSU: Xigmateck 550w
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64

Since most people use an SSD as their main boot drive, I installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 and updated it to the latest edition. From there I installed all relevant benchmarks and ran them with the SSD as the sole drive.

Methodology

To test this SSD I put it through several synthetic benchmarks and a real world boot test. The former benchmarks were as follows:

AS SSD
ATTO Disk Benchmark
Crystal Disk Mark
Sisoft Sandra Physical Disk Benchmark

For the real world boot test I used a stopwatch to time how long it would take the PC to reach the Windows 7 login screen.

I also ran a test of the drive’s TRIM abilities. To do this I filled the drive with many, many copies of PCmark Vantage’s installer. I promptly deleted them and ran the Crystal Disk Benchmark to see how well performance held up.

For comparison purposes, I’ve used the 1GB Samsung 103SJ HDD and the Samsung 470 128GB SSD.