SATA 3 SSD Roundup Review

Introduction

Solid State Drives are constantly becoming cheaper and cheaper, whilst the performance is increasing massively from the first ones that we tested. Of course if you're going to grab a SSD you want the best performing one you can, and that means going SATA3. Even the average models will max a SATA II connection and its 300MB/s cap.

Benchmarking is always a tricky balance. On the one hand we want to give you the most up-to-date and relevant benchmark tests possible, but equally data in a vacuum is pointless and so we can't just endlessly chop and change.

One area that has been in need of some tweaking has been our storage testing though. A lot of the benchmark suites we've been using were originally designed with mechanical drives in mind rather than the blistering pace, and abilities, of Solid State Drives. As our storage reviews have solely focussed upon SSDs for a long while now, Velociraptor RAID notwithstanding, we felt it was time to finally refresh our suite.

Enter the Anvil SSD Benchmarking tool. This provides the simplest 'one stop shop' for testing Solid State Drives and is the most consistent method we've found to obtain the all important IOPS result. Regular readers will remember our brief trials with IOMeter for these, but Anvil manages to be both easier to use, much easier to configure, and more reliable with its output.

So we felt it was time to give a roundup of some of the most popular SATA 6Gbp/s SSDs on the market and see which one of them will come out on top.

Test Setup

We have four of the main drives on hand, the Intel 520, the Mushkin Chronos, the Corsair Force 3, and the Kingston Hyper X. All of these drives are the 240GB versions, so that we'll be comparing like for like. This is important as different sized Solid State Drives have differences in performance.

Intel 520
Mushkin Chronos
Corsair Force GT
Kingston Hyper X
Intel Core i7-3960X @ 4.6GHz
ASUS Rampage IV Extreme
nVidia GTX570
Corsair AX1200W
Corsair GTX8
Corsair H100
Windows 7 Ultimate x64