It has become clear that simply conducting endless benchmarks on SSD drives is pointless. Real users may run a few benchmarks when they first fit their SSD drive, but most users just want a drive that performs well in the real world. They want their drive to work "out of the box" and work fast and smoothly.

Most of the latest SSD drives can deliver very fast sustained reading and writing speeds, but these alone tell you very little about how the drive will perform in the real world.

If you intend to use your SSD as your primary system drive, with an operating system and applications installed and running from the drive, real world performance becomes much more important than just fast sequential read and write speeds.

Real world copy tests

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I will now conduct a few real world copy tests. In these tests I try to simulate what a real user does with their drives. I will be coping some mp3 files, various picture files, and install MS office.

I should point out that this is not a scientific way of measuring performance. These timings were taken with a stop watch; I have however ensured that the reading drive is well able to supply a data stream to our writing drive, which is high enough not to be slowing down the performance of the writing drive. The source drive will be the Crucial M4.

I will once again be comparing the obtained results with our comparison drives, and will present the results in the form of graphs.

Copy tests – 259 MP3 song files (1.36GB total)

An acceptable result for the ADATA SP900 SSD.

Copy tests – 3,377 JPEG picture files (2.56GB total)

In this test the result is impressive.

Windows start-up and closedown

For these tests, I simply used a stop watch and tested the amount of time taken for a full installation of Windows 7 to boot to the desktop, and then timed how long it took for Windows 7 to close down by the normal start menu method. From now I will also be adding the time what Windows logs on the even viewer for start-up and shutdown.

The timing was started once the BIOS had initialised and reached the “loading OS message”.

Windows 7 boot time

Windows 7 shutdown

Excellent result on the shutdown test but slightly slower than the next drive that uses asynchronous NAND, again I am sure that in daily use no one will notice the difference.

Event Viewer Logs

First Shutdown

The next two screen shots were taken after I’d installed all the drivers and all the software that I use every day. Below are the results.

Used state boot time.

Used state shutdown

In the log that the event viewer holds, we can get a better idea of how much time it takes for the drive to boot and shutdown.

Installing applications

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Installing applications is possibly something you don’t do that often. But should you replace your system disk, then you will most likely have to re-install your applications. Most of the SSD drives I have tested up until now are quite slow at installing applications, most likely because their I/O performance was quite limited.

For these tests, we picked some popular applications and copied the entire contents of the CD or DVD media to an Crucial M4 256GB SSD. We did this to make sure that the reading speed of our CD/DVD reader would not hamper the performance of the target drive.

We then installed these applications onto our comparison HDD drives, which were all running mirror image installations of our Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit installation, and timed the amount of time taken to install the application with a stopwatch on each of the drives.

MS Office 2007 Professional (full install)

Now let’s see how the ADATA SP900 SSD performs with the installation of MS Office 2007 Enterprise Edition.

The procedure followed was very simple, I copied all the files from the CD to the Crucial M4 SSD and the Crucial M4 was used as a source drive for the installation of MS Office 2007.

This is an excellent result.

Speed degradation after heavy testing

On this page I will test how the SSD performs after heavy testing and usage.

I will run an AS SSD benchmark test when the OS if freshly installed so that we can get a good view on how the drive performs with the OS. after that I will fill the drive up to 50% of its capacity and use the drive for a few days, and then re-run the AS SSD benchmark. The same procedure will be followed once again, but this time the drive will be filled close to 90% of its capacity, and to finish this test, I will simply delete all the extra data and leave the PC idle for a few hours so that the controller has the time to perform any necessary cleaning and see how the drive will perform.

 

First run with the OS

With the drive filled 50%

Now the performance when the drive is 90% full

And finally the drive with only the OS and some everyday applications.

After a week with everyday use I would say that the drive clearly shows some good performance, not only in respect of the numbers, but also with regard to restoring the drive to its original performance. The only negative is the asynchronous NAND that slows down the performance, but that’s something to expect from a drive that is not aiming for the enthusiast market.

 

This concludes our review. To read the final thoughts and conclusion, click the link below….

 

• Anvil’s Storage Utilities
• Conclusion