FC-Test Results

Website: FC-Test

Our FC-Test benchmark is split into three parts. First is a write test involving the creation of a file pattern similar to common files such as MP3s or large video files. Once created on the drive, we then copy the file pattern from the drive back to a different folder on the same drive producing a combined read/write test. Finally we test the read speed of the drive by performing FC-Test's read test of the files copied.

For our benchmarks, we're using both the MP3 pattern, consisting of two hundred and seventy small files totalling 0.99GB, and the the ISO pattern, consisting of three large files totalling 1.6GB in size. We feel these file patterns represent the most common files people will be frequently copying to and from an drive, and can be interpreted as as close to a real world file transfer test as possible.




FC-Test is very indicative of real world drive performance, and what’s remarkable here is the Intel X25-M’s very capable write speed – it’s actually able to just about better the 1TB drive, with its triple platters and very high data density, in the MP3 file pattern write test. In comparison, the G.Skill and Patriot SSDs lag far behind taking almost twice as long to write the same data pattern.

Performance doesn’t improve for the G.Skill and Patriot in our combined read/write test, and again they post a result almost half the speed of the fastest mechanical hard drive. The problem here is that we’re writing and read/writing large batches of very small files – exactly the circumstance that can overwhelm the J-Micron disk controller. With the disk controller flooded with read/write commands we see clear evidence of the “stuttering” that plagues cheaper SSDs resulting in very poor write speeds.

In comparison the Intel X25-M drive, while still slower than the mechanical drives, doesn’t suffer from the stuttering problem caused by the flood of read/write commands anywhere near as badly, and the in-house Intel disk controller seems much more capable of dealing with intensive read/write situations.

Finally in our read test the SSDs are able to really show their stuff, convincingly faster than the mechanical drives and in the case of the Intel X25-M almost a full four seconds faster than the fastest mechanical drive at reading the mp3 file template.