Imation SSD versus Western Digital SATA: Performance test results
In today's shootout between Imation Pro 7000 solid state drives and Western Digital's VelociRaptor SATA disk drive (see "Product review: High price makes high-speed Imation SSDs a tough sell"), Mario Apicella finds that SSD is indeed the fastest storage that lots of money can buy. Given the whopping superiority of the Imation SSDs in read I/O and read transfer rates, their advantages for search-intensive applications may help dull the pain of the price premium ($550 for a 16GB model, $1,700 for 64GB). But for write-heavier workloads, $300 for a 300GB VelociRaptor is a lot easier to swallow. See the results of Mario's speed tests below.
Iometer test results
I/O operations per second (512 bytes)
| Test conditions | Imation declared | Imation Pro 7000 64GB | Imation Pro 7000 16GB | Western Digital VelociRaptor |
| Sequential writes | 45,000 | 45,400 | 45,226 | 23,165 |
| Random writes | 130 | 144 | 119 | 511 |
| Sequential reads | 81,000 | 77,899 | 79,916 | 19,926 |
| Random reads | 18,000 | 16,508 | 17,793 | 486 |
SiSoftware Sandra test results
Transfer rate (MB/sec)
| Physical Disks test | Imation Pro 7000 64GB | Imation Pro 7000 16GB | Western Digital VelociRaptor |
| Reads | 105 | 115 | 92 |
| Writes | 81 | 79 | 100 |
BootVis, Search, and Defrag test results
Times in minutes and seconds
| ... | Original boot drive | Imation Pro 7000 64GB | Imation Pro 7000 16GB | Western Digital VelociRaptor |
| BootVis | 82s | 78s | 78s | 78s |
| Search | 7m 43s | 57s | 56s | 2m 25s |
| Defrag | 50m 51s | 3m 14s | 3m 23s | 3m 21s |
| Analyze only | 3s | 1s | 1s | 2s |
Posted by Ted Samson on June 19, 2008 03:00 AM
