Corsair Performance 3 Series 256GB Solid State Drive Review

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/benchmarks/pcmark-vantage/
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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

Well, if this isn't a chart and a half.... Normally we would put the fastest of a series of tests at the top, but for this review we wanted to get the Corsair Performance 3 right next to the OCZ Vertex 2 240GB so you guys would easily see these two battling it out.

Here we see the two drives really getting dirty in the real world tests. The Performance 3 (with Sandy Bridge) wins some and at the same time the Vertex 2 wins some. This Vertex 2 was returned to My Digital Discount a couple of months after our test was over, so we don't have it for some extended tests.

PCMark Vantage - Fill Test

We did have a MemoRight 240GB drive in house that uses a similar configuration as the Vertex 2 240GB. These drives are not identical, but they do use the same SF-1200 and flash. They do not share the exact same programming or firmware. Let me set this up for you real quick, and then we can get back to the benchmark goodies.

Both drives were filled with roughly 133GB worth of data. This data was a mix of compressed files and non-compressed files. In the near future we will make a set of files available for testing several different capacity sizes of SSDs, but these files were real world files from my daily use notebook and NAS server.

In this chart we have the original benchmark runs with the drives empty and we have added the results of the drives with 133GB of data added. Things look quite a bit different now. The SandForce SF-1200 drive dropped performance across the board, but the Corsair Performance 3 actually gained some performance in some tests and lost very little in others.

Over time we will expand this type of coverage and include performance data from drives filled with 25%, 50% and 75% fill. The Corsair Performance 3 moved this type of testing up in this somewhat beta run. We felt that this story adds to the total picture and ignoring it would have led to a half truth review of the Performance 3.