The reasons to purchase a high-performance storage device are as varied as the consumers who purchase them. For some applications, the load time is the deciding factor in their purchasing decision. For others, it is Virtualized Operating System performance. For others, it is game load times. For others still, it is to shave a .1 of a second off their synthetic test scores to climb ever higher in the online rankings that various sites host.
With such a wide variety of criteria, it behooves us to use as wide and varied a list of testing protocols as possible. As such, we have used a blend of synthetic and real-world benchmarks, as well as custom-recorded real-world game benchmarking.
For game load times testing, we have chosen games that are clearly not Internet, GPU, RAM, or CPU bottlenecked. The system was cold restarted in between each load to make sure no data saved in the GPU’s ram could influence load times. As with all tests, all games were run four times, and the average, rounded to the nearest second,d is recorded as the official result.
For 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.
For Borderlands 2, we have recorded the time it takes to fast travel from the Sanctuary map to Oasis. Oasis is the beginning of the Captain Scarlett and Her Pirate’s Booty DLC. This was chosen as it is not only a special level not included in the original Borderlands 2 game, but also contains additional data, which should slow the load of this special map.
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.
For synthetic tests, we used a combination of the ATTO Disk Benchmark, AS-SSD, Crystal Disk Benchmark, HDTach, HD Tune, and IOMeter.
For real-world (non-gaming oriented) testing, we have used OS startup, Adobe Photoshop, VMWare, and data transfer times. For data transfer, we timed how long a single 100GB RAR file took to copy to and then from the devices. We also used 30 GB of small files (from 100kb to 200MB) with a total of 72,000 files in 2400 subfolders.
All tests were run 4 times, and average results are represented.
