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It doesn’t matter how good any of the synthetic suites are, the real meat of the testing has to be under absolute real world conditions. This proves difficult as to record results we have to narrow down fluctuation. Therefore while we would say these are the most useful results to get from this review, there is always going to be a slight margin for error – its not absolutely scientific.
Firstly we installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit Edition onto each of the drives, no programs were installed, just the operating system and a clean update from Microsoft with all patches and security fixes. The machine was then shut down and once started up we recorded boot times – until we reached a working desktop. We used a digital watch for this and repeated the test five times for each drive – once we had these five results we averaged the results and took that for the final figure. We also included a standard £70 Western Digital 1TB hard drive for comparison purposes.
A system that previously took 68 seconds to boot on a standard 1TB drive, now takes 19 seconds with 4 of the Intel 40GB SSD's in Raid 0. We are extremely impressed by this end result and while the graph doesnt show it, we noticed real world benefits when using the operating system also.
Yes, 1.5 seconds to open Adobe Photoshop CS5. Incredible is not the word ! To be fair, the Corsair F40 drives in dual Raid configuration were only marginally slower. Compare this to the 7 seconds it takes with a mechanical 1TB drive and you can see the benefits long term.
Stalker is a slow loading game at the best of times so rather than just measure Photoshop (which is fast regardless) we felt this was a worthwhile inclusion. Our fastest time was 14 seconds recorded with the Quad Raid 0 Intel solution, which was three seconds quicker than the dual Corsair F40 and five seconds faster than the 6GBps Crucial C300 256GB drive. This might not seem like much, but compare this to 34 seconds achieved with a 1TB drive and you begin to see the vast amount of time saved.
This site just gets cooler every day. what an awesome idea.
Over 650MB/s. Almost spat out my tea there, what a great concept idea from intel and very cool of them to send you 4 SSDS for this !
Tips my hat to you Zardon. what a brilliant idea and its actually VERY practical. this is easily upgraded over the months.
That is immense. I love the Corsair F40s and they would be faster than four of these, but if the prices of these drives drop to 80 each, what a bloody great deal. I STILL strongly believe that write speed is no where near as important as read in windows environment. Not outside a server anyway. This is a good indication of read performance.
Until you broke it down on conclusion page I had a brief moment of “WTF!” when I saw the review title. Great idea and it does scale very well, single drive write of 35mb/s is poorish, but it really helps in raid 0. Also that is brilliant to hear their raid 0 controller can still offer TRIM support! That might mean the edge over corsair.
Raid 0 TRIM support? I must have missed that one. intel stepped up to the plate with that. only maker I know who supports that unless ive missed more.
over 650 megabytes per second. Its quite amusing to see that. I know the PCIe controllers are much higher cost for this level of performance from flash memory.
holy crap batman – thats some mega bandwidth !!!!!
Very impressed with this – very interesting article.
An interesting point was made. People might look at this and say/ what the hell is the point? but when you look at the price in total, thats actually LESS than I paid for my first big mechanical hard drive. we are so spolit for choice now. clearly im showing my age.
I would be happy with one of these ! Seriously. I might get one from yoyotech when prices drop.
Is kitguru working with yoyotech now? I live near the store. might pop in and say hello.
As much as the article is fascinating, I dont think this is very realistic for most people. I mean you are using 4 SATA ports on your motherboard for a start which means most of them are gone without getting any mechanical drives.
@ Dan. I don’t agree. most motherboards now have 6 sata ports. even lower end boards. so you would be left with at least 2 slots. 2x2TB hard drives. 4TB mechanical ‘storage’ and mega quick boot up. Works for me and most people I would think.
4 SSDs? I almost swallowed my spoon there.
What is the point of this? 650 MB/s who the hell needs that?
@ Robert, probably not many ‘need it’ but people in some countries would say the same thing about the spoon you just swallowed. thats classed as a luxury also 😉
I think its interesting. If you did it with 256GB Crucial drives at £550 a pop then I might slap some heads, but these are meant to be dropping to £80 a piece soon, its not a lot really for maximum performance.
Fascinating idea really. and it works well. the write performance is quite low, even with four, but i guess it doesnt translate into crap real world performance
Great idea, love it. well done.
The game test got me, the start up time, thats wicked.
Scrummy. COrsair F40 are better but a little more expensive. Have to say I had no idea you lost TRIM support in RAid 0 so the fact Intel support it seems to be a decided factor.
Very nice testing idea, and its a good upgrade option for many users. the 40GB drives seem a great choice right now. Think the corsair ones are also very good.
Great review thanks for the unusual tests, really appeal to me. First time posting, but long time reader.