Technology X Tomorrow's Technology Today! 
TSSDR TEST BENCH AND PROTOCOL
SSD Testing at TSSDR differs slightly depending on whether we are looking at consumer or enterprise SSDs. For consumer SSDs, our goal is to test in a system that has been optimized with our SSD Optimization Guide, although CPU C States have not been changed at all. Benchmarks for consumer testing are also benchmarks with a fresh drive so, not only can we verify that manufacturer specifications are in line but also, so the consumer can replicate our tests to confirm that they have an SSD that is top-notch. We even provide links to most of the benchmarks used in the report.
Enterprise testing is significantly different as we explore performance in steady state, explore drive latency, and do our best to follow SNIA test protocol. For the Toshiba 512GB cSSD, it is intended to be marketed as a retail item so we are going to follow our typical consumer SSD testing protocol.
SYSTEM COMPONENTS
This new PCIe Test Bench build was the result of some great relationships and purchase; our appreciation goes to the below mentioned manufacturers for their support in our project. Our choice of components is very narrow, in that, we choose only what we believe to be among the best available and links are provided to each that will assist in hardware pricing and availability, should the reader be interested in purchase.
| PC CHASSIS: | Corsair Special Edition White Graphite 600T Mid-Tower |
| MOTHERBOARD: | Asus P8Z77-V Premium ATX Motherboard |
| CPU: |
Intel Core i7-3770K Ivy Bridge 3.5GHz Quad Core |
| CPU COOLER: | Corsair H100 High Performance Liquid |
| POWER SUPPLY: | OCZ 1000W Fatail1ty Series |
| SYSTEM COOLING: | be quiet Silent Wings 2 PC Fans |
| GRAPHICS CARD: |
PNY GeForce GTX 680 |
| MEMORY: | Crucial Ballistix Sport DDR3-1600Mhz Memory |
| KEYBOARD: | Corsair Vengeance K95 Mechanical Gaming Keyboard |
| MOUSE: | Corsair Vengeance M95 MMO/RTS Laser Mouse |
| ROUTER: | NetGear R6300 AC1750 Dual Band Gigabit WiFi Router |
| HBA | HighPoint RocketU 1144C 4 x USB 3.0 20Gb/s HBA |
.
BENCHMARK SOFTWARE
The software we will be using for today’s analysis is typical of many of our reviews and consists of ATTO Disk Benchmark, Crystal Disk Info, Crystal DiskMark, AS SSD, Anvil Storage Utilities, and PCMark Vantage. In consumer reports, we prefer to test with easily accessible software that the consumer can obtain, and in many cases, we even provide links. Our selection of software allows each to build on the last and, also, to provide validation to results already obtained.
ATTO Disk Benchmark is perhaps one of the oldest benchmarks going and is definitely the main staple for manufacturer performance specifications. ATTO uses RAW or compressible data and, for our benchmarks, we use a set length of 256mb and test both the read and write performance of various transfer sizes ranging from 0.5 to 8192kb. Manufacturers prefer this method of testing as it deals with raw (compressible) data rather than random (includes incompressible data) which, although more realistic, results in lower performance results.
Initial ATTO performance displays higher performance than that listed by Toshiba which is the result of the latest component and firmware update. Performance of 551MB/s read and 516MB/s write are typical of what we might see with upper tier SSDs and breaching the threshold of SATA 3.
CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER. 3.0 X64
Crystal Disk Benchmark is used to measure read and write performance through sampling of highly compressible data (oFill/1Fill), or random data which is, for the most part, incompressible. Performance is virtually identical, regardless of data sample so we have included only that using random data samples:
As with typical Crystal DiskMark results, things seem to drop a bit from ATTO. With this test, however, we like to keep our eye on the low 4K write performance and 87MB/s is a decent return. We were a bit disappointed, however, as our results in both the M.2 and mSATA cSSDs brought in amazing low4K write performance above 107MB/s and we would have like to see the same here. Is it possible this is an older controller?
Up until recently, AS SSD was the only benchmark created specifically for SSD testing and it uses incompressible data. AS SSD, for the most part, gives us the ‘worst case scenario’ in SSD transfer speeds because of its use of incompressible data and many enthusiasts like to AS SSD for their needs. Transfer speeds are displayed on the left with IOPS results on the right.
AS SSD provides our first glimpse of IOPS and the 4K-64Thrd read performance of 92537 IOPS is nothing to sneeze at, and typical of today’s best SSDs. The Total Score of 963 is also a decent representation of the cSSD caliber. Looking at the AS SSD Copy benchmark, however, really impressed us as three solid SATA 3 return speeds is still not common…
