Corsair Force GT & Performance Pro SATA III SSD Roundup

Real World Performance

One of the most common operations performed on a PC is moving/copying files. Using a free application called Teracopy, we copied large numbers of two file types from one folder to another on the same drive. Teracopy allows us to objectively measure the time of transfer and using the same drive prevents other devices from tainting the outcome. The operation requires the drive to perform both sustained read and writes simultaneously. The first set of files is a 5GB collection of highly compressible text files of variable size.

The second is a collection of MP3 files of various sizes which totals 5GB collectively. These file types were chosen due to their wide use and mixture of file size and compression levels.

Install Results: Pretty close overall, albeit mixed results, regardless of the data used. The Force GT 180 is faster in the compressible data copy but slower in the compressed data copy. Surprisingly, the Force GT 240 didn’t post the best times in either category.

We also timed the installation of a few rather lengthy applications/suites as app installs is something everyone does and waiting for completion can be a drag. We used Adobe Dreamweaver CS5, Microsoft Office 2010 Professional and Futuremark’s 3DMark Vantage (v1.102.1901) as our test subjects with all install settings at default. Both were installed from an installer located on the target drive itself as installing from another drive, especially an optical drive, would cause a bottle-neck that would corrupt the results. The timing for these had to be done via stopwatch so there should be about a half second +/- error margin. Again, with the source and target drives being the same, concurrent read/write activity is required.

Install Results: Again, very close in terms of performance with the Force GT 240GB sweeping the test with the best times for each although by mere seconds.

We’ll wrap this with a look at the total drive capacity and our final thoughts.