Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue 256GB SSD Review

HD Tune v4.01 – Random Access

The random access read and write test is a very important performance area to look at on solid state drives as some controllers have problems with random writes. In recent years the controllers have improved and the firmware has been better optimized for random read and write performance.

Random Access Read Test Results:

Benchmark Results: When it comes to the random access read performance test the WD SiliconEdge Blue 256GB SSD drive did fairly well with solid average access times and what we would call entry level performance in both IOPS and MB/s. The 4KB speed on the WD SiliconEdge Blue 256GB SSD was 17.8MB/s.

Some other notables:

• Toshiba HG2 256GB SSD – 28.0MB/s
• Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB – 31.5MB/s
• OCZ Vertex LE 100GB – 33.4MB/s
  

When it comes to operations per second (IOPS) the WD SiliconEdge Blue 256GB SSD had 4553 IOPS.

Some other notables:

• Toshiba HG2 256GB SSD – 7164 IOPS
• Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB – 8079 IOPS
  
• OCZ Vertex LE 100GB – 8752 IOPS
• Intel X25-M G2 160GB – 16021 IOPS
  

Random Access Write Test Results:

Benchmark Results: The write performance test results of the WD SiliconEdge Blue 256GB SSD were decent looking up to the 1MB file size where the average access time jumped up to 235ms. The random write access time was 478ms with just 2 IOPS and 1MB/s.

4KB Random Access Write File Test Results Chart:

Benchmark Results: Many of our readers have asked for a chart showing side-by-side comparisons of the drives we have tested in the 4KB random access write test. You can see from this chart that the WD SiliconEdge Blue 256GB SSD had a tough time keeping up in random access write tests at 4KB.