Zalman N Series 128GB SandForce SF-1222 SSD Review

HD Tach & CrystalDiskMark Synthetic Benches

HD TACH 3.0.4.0

HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives (ZIP/JAZZ), flash devices, and RAID arrays. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers of software as possible and get as close to the physical performance of the device as possible.

Benchmark Results: The results are very typical of a SandForce drive with a very smooth graph line as we see above with the Zalman N Series drive. The raw numbers also reflect the expected results which a very favorable.

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.0h

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.

Benchmark Results: Because this benchmark uses incompressible data, the SandForce drives don’t perform as well as some of the other drives on the sequential read/writes but strut their stuff on the 4k tests. The Zalman blends right in.