HDTach results

Website: HD Tach 3.0


HD Tach’s burst speed test certainly shows that the SSDs mean business, with the Intel drive exceeding its maximum quoted speed with a whopping 259.9MB/s thanks to its onboard cache and both the G.Skill and Patriot delivering on their claims of 175MB/s . The high performance of the Seagate 250GB’s burst speed is down to its efficient cache which delivers a slightly misleading result – something which is cleared up in the average read.


In the Average Read test the performance advantage of the Intel X25-M really becomes apparent; delivering a monstrous 237.1MB/s read speed across the entire drive. The G.Skill and Patriot drives however were a little disappointing, with the read speed across the drive bouncing between two speeds, producing an average of just 140.5MB/s – the first example of the stuttering problems that can be caused by the cheaper J-Micron disk controller when flooded with read/write commands.

The hard drives really struggle to compete on this level, thanks to the fundamental drawbacks of their design. While read speeds at the edge of the drive’s platters are very fast (as the drive heads have less distance to travel), drive read speed decreases the further towards the middle of the drive data is stored, dragging the average read speed down.


In the random access time test there really is no contest – all three SSDs posted results of 0.2m/s or less, leaving the mechanical drives languishing behind.