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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 £60 Western Digital 1TB hard drive for comparison purposes.
31 seconds is a solid time for the Toshiba controller and falls in line with the 128GB Kingston drive, as we would expect after seeing all our previous test results.
Snow Leopard 10.6.4 Boot Times
Not everyone uses Windows 7, and although TRIM is only supported by this Operating system, I like to expand results a little when possible. I therefore used my Macintosh MacBook pro 17 inch, Generation 5.1 which is based around a 2.93ghz Core 2 Duo processor with 9600m graphics. There is 8GB of DDR3 ram in this machine with a full 3 Gigabit link speed over the nVidia MCP79 AHCI. I also enabled the full 64bit Kernel and Extensions – if you want to read more, check out this article.
Before we show the results it is worth pointing out that we don’t expect to see gains like we did on the Windows 7 platform, because our Macintosh controller is limited to Sata 3Gbps. We also can’t run any Raid 0 configurations as the machine only supports a single sata drive.
With an 18 seconds boot time on the Macintosh, this drive is a great high storage, fast option for businessmen on the move.
I almost fainted at the price, but for the capacity and audience interested, it makes sense.
THese are good drives, but for over a grand, seems pointless for me anyway. thats the price of a full system 🙂
Just ordered two for Raid 0 in my new rig. yes, im kidding.
Good review though, seems to be a drive for wealthy playboys rather than college peops like me
This is the size I want, but until they hit one third the price they are now, its a pipedream for me.
Zardon come on buddy, lets keep it real. they have probably sold 10 of these worldwide 😉
Tim you would be surprised how many businesses buy these, and even the people who buy GTX480s for SLI, might have a few of these in raid 0 without the need for a mechanical storage option.
lol, yeah maybe, but its such a massive amount of money. id go for the 128GB drive and get a 2TB mechanical for the files. But maybe im just a peasant :p
And just to stress my point – http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-168-SE&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=1279
you could get literally 20TB of mechanical storage for a single 512GB SSD
Tim until the prices drop, which wont happen for quite some time (not to that point anyway), its always going to be the case. Flash memory like this is still very expensive.
I like this drive, cant say I like the price, but for a businessman on the move, it makes a lot of sense really. it can be billed as expenses, you never have to worry about a knock wrecking the platter on the move and you can easily store all your business related work files and more on a single product.
I think ill have to pass, my poor heart cant take it.
Holy Moly! For that kind of money you can buy very powerful RAID card + bunch of 2.5″ HDDs for RAID0 and superior performance or RAID 6 and superior storage space… or both with two independent arrays!
I think my wallet just fainted. if you have the money for this, I envy you !
Lovely, every PC should have one. or two.
I read this thinking, this is great, might get one myself then I realised its over a grand. I feel like a pauper now. 40GB Corsair unit for me I think !
It’s weird seeing the Vertex 2 being schooled by the Agility 2. I thought it would have been the other way around. It also shows the Sandforce not being affected by the smaller over provisioning of the Agility 2.
Thats a monster of a drive at a monster price… They will come down soon I am sure. Nice review!