CrystalDiskMark
CrystalDiskMark is a small HDD and SSD benchmark utility that allows you to measure a drive’s sequential and random performance.
Fresh Drive
Conditioned Drive
Drive Analysis
With the performance analysis, we get a good view of the drive’s consistency. We want as straight a line as possible for a good result.
Drive Comparison
For the drive comparison, we will use the performance figures from empty drives here.
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!