Plextor M6M 128GB mSATA Solid State Drive Review

Anvil’s Storage Utilities

Anvil’s Storage Utilities is a new benchmarking utility that we have started using here at eTeknix, it’s completely free to download and has the ability to test mainly hard drives and solid state drives, but also any other form of storage medium that you can throw at it. As well as testing the drive in a variety of benchmarking tests, it also has a drive endurance test that consistently reads and writes data to the selected medium to give days, months and potentially even years of use in a shorter period of time to see how the drive copes in the longer term.

Unconditioned

Conditioned

To expand on the AS SSD compression charts that we saw a few pages back, Anvils has the ability to test a drive with only compressible or incompressible data, giving us a more in-depth look at how the SandForce controller operates. As we can see, when shifting the switch to using compressible data, the write performance rockets, giving over twice performance that it can offer when working with incompressible data. This variation in performance is the prime reason why many vendors have omitted SandForce controllers from their top end drives.

Drive Comparison

For the purpose of drive comparison I use the performance figures from both unconditioned and conditioned tests with 0% data fill.