Intel Z68 Chipset & Smart Response Technology

CrystalDiskMark & PCMark Vantage

CrystalDiskMark is a small benchmark utility for drives and enables rapid measurement of sequential and random read/write speeds. Note that CDM only supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ) with a queue depth of 32 (as noted) for the last listed benchmark score. This can skew some results in favor of controllers that also do not support NCQ.

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 – Intel Z68 Platform

Benchmark Results: Clearly, as compared to the single HDD, the performance increases on the secondary runs for each cached SSD were dramatic for most file sizes and posted some impressive numbers. There were a few spots, especially in the sequential tests where the Vertex cache wasn’t much help but as a user most data use is random anyway so that’s where you’d want the improvements anyway.

PCMark Vantage 1.0.2.0 – Intel Z68 Platform

PCMark Vantage v1.01 measures the performance of the latest PC hardware across a variety of common scenarios. PCMark Vantage supports both system level and component level benchmarking and comprises several different test suites but for the purposes of this review, we stuck with just the HDD suite. The nice thing about PCMark Vantage is that you can submit your scores online and compare against others.

Benchmark Results: Although the first time running the benchmark in SSD cached mode yielded minor gains, the second runs really demonstrated the tremendous performance boost afforded by the SSD.