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.

We've learned that HD Tune isn't multi-threaded when it requests data so this sequential test does not take advantage of the Vertex 4s unique ability to read multiple steams quickly. With the first firmware release each request was limited to around 200MB/s. With the new firmware the 200MB/s limit has increased to around 310MB/s on average for the first request.

When it comes to writing data the Vertex 4 goes into weapons free mode, fire at will! There are a couple of things to talk about in this benchmark though, not everything is cut and dry here. HD Tune uses compressible data, so the drives based on SandForce controllers appear to have an advantage here. When working with compressible data that is the case, but the Vertex 4 does not slow down when using incompressible data, data that can't be further compressed. We'll look at the incompressible performance in a few pages.

Also, you may notice the Vertex 4 128GB's minimum performance of 187.3MB/s. With the new firmware we get a single dip about three quarters of the way through the test. This was the same on all three capacity sizes we've tested. The dip is very brief. If I were to guess it lasts for maybe a half to a quarter of a second.