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!
Real World Data Transfers
No matter how good a synthetic benchmark like IOMeter is, it cannot really tell you how your hard drive will perform in “real world” situations. To this end we will be running timed data transfers to give you a general idea of how its performance relates to real life use. To help replicate worse case scenarios we will transfer a 30.00GB contiguous file.
Testing will include transfer to and transferring from the devices, using MS RichCopy and a USB 3.1 external enclosure that uses two Samsung 840 EVO 250GB drives in RAID 0, and then logging the performance of the drive. Here is what we found.
System Boot Time
When it comes to system performance the most obvious test is how long it takes for the system to actually boot up and fully load the Operating System. This particular test uses an image of our older test bed’s OS which is far from being in a pristine state. For ease of repetition we have used the Anti-Virus splash screen as our finish line as it is the last program to be loaded on startup.
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.
These results are why you should take all synthetic benchmark results with a grain of salt. While yes there is no denying that the other systems are faster, they are not massively faster – like the synthetic test results would lead you to believe. Instead this little device is pretty darn peppy and more than adequate for most home user scenarios. If you think your particular needs fall outside this devices abilities…move up a notch to the i5 version.
