A very important part of overall system responsiveness is down to hard drive performance. We use two of our favourite benchmark utilities Crystalmark X64 Edition and HD Tach to rate the Intel SSD from the onboard SATA controller.
For a SATA 2 based drive the results aren't bad, although the write performance is lacking when compared against the latest Sandforce 2281 powered solid state drives. Still, it is significantly faster than any mechanical drive on the market.
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.
The results from ATTO mirror the performance from Crystalmark. The Intel drive in this system is limited to around 260 MB/s read and 95 MB/s write.
Wow they fairly dropped the ball with this one.
Looks nice, but yeah that drive configuration is a ‘wtf’ moment……… someone needs to get a drilling over that.
the average joe wouldnt even notice too.
Asus do a great gaming machime for 1000
Wow what a stupid move, losing over half of the ssd to a recovery partition. Looks like they really didnt work this out very well at all.
It looks ok, but its a rather shoddy design, overall. Why would anyone want a light button to turn on side lights? Alienware do this so much better, even on their cheap 13 inch machine.
Good review, and honest