The PCMark 10 Full System Drive Benchmark uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and common tasks to fully test the performance of the fastest modern drives. The benchmark is designed to measure the performance of fast system drives using the SATA bus at the low end and devices connected via PCI Express at the high end.
The goal of the benchmark is to show meaningful real-world performance differences between fast storage technologies such as SATA, NVMe, and Intel’s Optane. The Full System Drive Benchmark uses 23 traces, running 3 passes with each trace. It typically takes an hour to run.
Traces used:
Booting Windows 10.
Adobe Acrobat – starting the application until usable.
Adobe Illustrator – starting the application until usable Adobe Premiere Pro – starting the application until usable.
Adobe Photoshop – starting the application until usable.
Battlefield V – starting the game until the main menu.
Call of Duty Black Ops 4 – starting the game until the main menu.
Overwatch – starting the game until main menu.
Using Adobe After Effects.
Using Microsoft Excel.
Using Adobe Illustrator.
Using Adobe InDesign.
Using Microsoft PowerPoint.
Using Adobe Photoshop (heavy use).
Using Adobe Photoshop (light use).
cp1 Copying 4 ISO image files, 20 GB in total, from a secondary drive to the target drive (write test).
cp2 Making a copy of the ISO files (read-write test).
cp3 Copying the ISO to a secondary drive (read test).
cps1Copying 339 JPEG files, 2.37 GB in total, to the target drive (write test).
cps2 Making a copy of the JPEG files (read-write test).
cps3 Copying the JPEG files to another drive (read test).
The 1TB P44 Pro sailed through PCMark 10's Full System Drive Benchmark without any problems. It averaged 292MB/s for the six Adobe start-up test traces, with the Premier Pro setup trace fastest at 328MB/s. The average for the five usage traces was 549MB/s, helped in no small part by the 1,184MB/s result for the Adobe Photoshop heavy usage trace.
The drive produced very good figures for the cp1, cp2 and cp3 tests. Fastest was the cp3 read test at 4,368MB/s, next was the cp1 Write test at 3,977MB/s and finally the cp2 Read-Write test at 3,485MB/s.
The overall bandwidth figure of 618.93MB/s sees the drive heading the table by quite a margin. The drive also heads the overall score (3930) and has an impressively low average access time of 42 µs.