AIDA64 Storage Benchmark
AIDA64 is a streamlined Windows diagnostic and benchmarking software for home users with a broad range of features to assist in overclocking, hardware error diagnosis, stress testing, and sensor monitoring.
The app has unique capabilities to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives and is compatible with most Microsoft Windows operating systems. It also has a disk benchmark tool, and that is the one I’ll be using.
Fresh Drive
The Linear Read and Write tests measure the sequential performance by reading or writing all sectors without skipping any. It gives us a view of the drives overall performance from start to end.
The Random Read and Write tests measure the random performance by reading or writing variable-sized data blocks at random locations on the surface of the drive. The Random tests are a combination of both speed and access times as it moves the position before each new operation.
Conditioned Drive
The Linear Read and Write tests measure the sequential performance by reading or writing all sectors without skipping any. It gives us a view of the drives overall performance from start to end.
The Random Read and Write tests measure the random performance by reading or writing variable-sized data blocks at random locations on the surface of the drive. The Random tests are a combination of both speed and access times as it moves the position before each new operation.
The Access time tests are designed to measure the data access performance by reading or writing small 0.5KB data blocks at random locations on the drive surface.
Drive Analysis
LISTEN! The most important feature, and reason to buy these drives, is they have power-loss-protected (PLP) cache, not for protecting your data, BUT FOR SPEED!
In my believe the most important thing about PLP is it should improve direct synchronous I/O (ESX and SQL) because the drive can report back that the data is “written to disk” as soon as the data hit the cache, where a non PLP drive actually need to write the data to the nand before reporting “OK”!
And for that reason it’s obvious the size of the PLP protected cache is pretty important.
None of those two features are considered and tested in this review, which is very criticizable.
This is the main-reasons you should go for these drives. I’ve asked Kingston about the PLP protected cache size and I got:
SEDC500M/480 – 1GB
SEDC500M/960 – 2GB
SEDC500M/1920 – 4GB
These sizes could play a huge different in synchronous I/O intensive systems/applications.
Please cover these factors in you review!