ADATA Premier Pro SP300 24GB mSATA Cache Solid State Drive Review

1. Introduction2. ADATA Premier Pro SP300 mSATA SSD3. Testing Methodology 4. Synthetic: ATTO Disk Benchmark5. Synthetic: CrystalDiskMark6. Synthetic: IOMeter7. Synthetic: PCMark 78. Real World Testing: Windows 7 Boot Time9. Real World Testing: Program Launching 10. Real World Testing: File Opening11. Real World Testing: Game Load Time12. Closing Thoughts13. View All Pages

It's very difficult to accurately measure the time taken to load a single program. To circumvent such inaccuracies, we created a .BAT file that loaded 5 different programs, simultaneously.

We chose to use Google Chrome, Microsoft Office 2007's Word and Excel, Windows' built-in calculator and Adobe Reader X. To fully push the drives' random read performance, we configured Google Chrome to load 3 webpages (KitGuru.net, BBC.co.uk and Hotmail.com), 2 Excel spreadsheets were launched, 3 PDF files got selected, 3 Word documents were chosen and last but not least, Windows calculator. Remember, as we were using a .BAT file, we click open and this whole process launches. Each file, webpage and program attempts to open simultaneously, putting a demanding load on our OS drive.

This can represent the real world scenario of pay-day when you could be simultaneously opening your working hours and finances spreadsheets, word-based invoices, PDF-based pay slips, online banking and Windows calculator.

A stopwatch was used to measure the time taken to load every last one of the programs and files/webpages. We measured the time taken from clicking open to the final file completing its opening procedure and displaying on our screen.

This method provides a clear differential between the random performances of each drive, and, as the time taken is significantly longer than a single program, the margin of error in our timing method is drastically reduced. We repeated the test 7 times and, to reduce the performance differentials due to measurement errors, rounded the stopwatch value to the nearest second.

Once Intel SRT dynamically memorises the commonly-used programs and caches them onto the SP300 SSD, an impressive 4 seconds is required to load every item from our demanding .BAT file. This result is even more remarkable when comparing it against the Seagate HDD's finishing time of 26 seconds – a 550% time increase and performance deficit.

The 6 second result of Kingston's V100 drive also proves that a caching system is quite clearly capable of SSD-like performance.

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