PCMark Vantage - Hard Disk Tests

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.0.0

Developer Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com

Product Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com/products/pcmarkvantage

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PCMark® Vantage is the first objective hardware performance benchmark for PCs running 32 and 64 bit versions of Microsoft® Windows Vista®. PCMark Vantage is perfectly suited for benchmarking any type of Microsoft® Windows Vista PC from multimedia home entertainment systems and laptops to dedicated workstations and high-end gaming rigs. Regardless of whether the benchmarker is an artist or an IT Professional, PCMark Vantage shows the user where their system soars or falls flat, and how to get the most performance possible out of their hardware. PCMark Vantage is easy enough for even the most casual enthusiast to use yet supports in-depth, professional industry grade testing.

FutureMark has developed a good set of hard disk tests for their PCMark Vantage Suite. Windows users can count on Vantage to show them how a drive will perform in normal day to day usage scenarios. For most users these are the tests that matter since many of the old hat ways to measure performance have become ineffective to measure true Windows performance.

HDD1 - Windows Defender

HDD2 - Gaming

HDD3 - Windows Photo Gallery

HDD4 - Vista Startup

HDD5 - Windows Movie Maker

HDD6 - Windows Media Center

HDD7 - Windows Media Player

HDD8 - Application Loading

We've got a lot of data here to look at, so let's start where I like to - down low. At the very bottom we have the OCZ Vertex 3, the trend setter for 2011. The 120GB model showed here now costs right around 200 USD, even less when you tack on the mail-in rebate over at Newegg. The Vertex 3 has everything you want in a modern solid state drive and sets our baseline for performance in this test.

Just above the Vertex 3 is the RevoDrive Hybrid running on just the 1TB HDD without the Dataplex software installed. This is obviously the performance we are trying to improve upon.

Just above the HDD only test is the SSD only test, also without Dataplex installed. This is the level of performance we hope the full package RevoDrive Hybrid can deliver when reading back hot data.

Now it's time to merge the HDD and the SSD together and run our first test with Dataplex installed and ready to collect data on your computing habits. In this test run we see the performance has increased over the HDD only tests by a small amount, but we are still at regular HDD levels.

At the very top we see the full benefits of the OCZ HybridDrive with your data loaded up into the cache. This is where you want to be, SSD performance with the capacity of a platter drive.

As you can see, the performance has improved by a large margin since the first run with Dataplex installed. More importantly, the RevoDrive Hybrid came very close to the performance of the Vertex 3 120GB when reading back hot data.