ADOBE CS6 LOAD TIME
Photoshop is a notoriously slow loading program under the best of circumstances, and while the latest version is actually pretty decent, when you add in a bunch of extra brushes and the such you get a really great torture test which can bring even the best of the best to their knees. Let’s see how our review unit faired in the Adobe crucible!
VMWare Load Time Performance
VMWare is a powerful application which allows users the ability to run a virtualized Operating System from inside their main OS. This program is not only processor and RAM intensive but puts significant load on the storage subsystem with deep, heavy read/write IO requests to the drive. To help give you a general idea on the performance improvements from running a RAM Drive we have timed the time it takes to load XP SP3 from inside VMWare.
Once again this drive does act more like a 1TB last generation MX300 and this is rather impressive given the fact that there is only so much room for improvement on the controller side of the equation. This new NAND plus SMI controller combination is shaping up to be the best of both worlds: inexpensive but no slouch in the performance department.
Borderlands 2 Load time
For Borderlands 2 we have recorded the time it takes to fast travel from Sanctuary map to Oasis. Oasis is the beginning of the Captain Scarlett and Her Pirate’s Booty DLC. This was chosen as it not only is a special level not included in the original Borderlands 2 game and thus contains additional data which should slow the load of this special map.
CoD: Ghosts Load time
For the Call of Duty: Ghosts we timed the level load time for the map called Into the Deep in the single player game. This level was chosen as it contains a large map and loads a lot of data from the storage device to the GPU.
Saints Row 3 Load time
For Saints Row 3 (labelled ‘SR3’ in the chart) we have recorded the load time from a specific save game. The game was saved just at the end of the ‘Shaundi saved’ version of “Three Way Ending” but before the cut scene. This was chosen as the game not only loads the Three Way Ending data but also the next level “Gangsta’s in Space” DLC level.
When it comes to read centric scenarios like games just about any modern SATA based solid-state drive is going to be good but not a great option – and the MX500 is no exception. Just like VMWare users, RAID should be seriously considered if you want the lowest game load times possible without going the NVMe route. Considering how fast these 500GB capacity versions are… that will prove to be no hardship for serious PC gaming enthusiasts. In other words, the MX500 is fast for a SATA drive but there are certain limitations that even God cannot overcome.
