Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue 256GB Solid State Drive

HD Tune Pro

Version and / or Patch Used: 4.00
Developer Homepage: http://www.efdsoftware.com
Product Homepage: http://www.hdtune.com

HD Tune is a Hard Disk utility which has the following functions:

- Benchmark: measures the performance
- Info: shows detailed information
- Health: checks the health status by using SMART
- Error Scan: scans the surface for errors
- Temperature display

HD Tune Pro gives us accurate read, write and access time results and for the last couple of years has been gaining popularity amongst reviewers. It is now considered a must have application for storage device testing.

Read Tests

Our STR read numbers look really good and line up perfectly with the Indilinx Barefoot drives.

Write Tests

I wish I could say the same for the write test. Here we see all kinds of madness. Let's take a closer look.

Taking a closer look at the Write Speed, we see a massive drop off at the 60% mark. This same anomaly was observed on three different systems and all between the 60 and 63% mark. This is not the level of performance we would like to see from a product that has over 250,000 hours of testing under its belt. Also, since solid state drives have their own wear leveling algorithm, we can't see how a couple of bad flash modules would cause this type of issue.

Let's hang tight and see if any of this appears once the drive handles real world application testing.