MSI GT60-2OK 3K Mobile Workstation Review

SSD Performance

AIDA64 Storage

AIDA64 Extreme Edition is a streamlined Windows diagnostic and benchmarking software for home users. AIDA64 Extreme Edition provides a wide range of features to assist in overclocking, hardware error diagnosis, stress testing, and sensor monitoring. It has unique capabilities to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives. AIDA64 is compatible with all current 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft Windows operating systems, including Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark is a small HDD benchmark utility for your hard drive that enables you to rapidly measure sequential and random read/write speeds.

Here are some key features of “CrystalDiskMark”:

• Sequential reads/writes
• Random 4KB/512KB reads/writes
• Text copy
• Change dialog design
• internationalization (i18n)

Looking at the performance that the mSATA SSD has to offer, we see a turn around in events, with a heap of performance on hand. With speeds of just over 480MB/s recorded, the fast read speeds that we see here soon make up for the hold back in performance that we see from the processor and memory.

Moving away from the OpenGL performance tests and moving back to general system performance tests, our first port of call is the SSD performance. On the engineering sample that I’ve got, MSI have use 3x 64GB Toshiba THNSNF064GMCS mSATA drives built on a 19nm architecture and each boasting read and write speeds of 524MB/s and 440MB/s respectively. This makes each drive on its own highly rated, but by putting three units together into a single RAID0 array, we see one amazing read speed that theoretically can hit 1572MB/s. In the real work however there will be a slight drop in performance, but even still, the RAID controller is still able to pack a mighty punch with just over 1.3GB/s read speed and a write speed of  just over 600MB/s (approximately half the theoretical maximum).