PCMark 8

Website: www.futuremark.com

PCMark 8 includes a storage workload which includes traces (recordings of drive activity) of popular, modern programs. The test times how long it takes to run a trace on a particular drive. Importantly, the traces are run in real time, meaning idle times are included in the final results, which are thus reflective of what you'd experience yourself.

There are numerous traces included within the test, but we've selected four which cover a variety of typical use scenarios and read/write patterns. For gaming, we have Battlefield 3, a read intensive trace. Adobe InDesign and Microsoft Word cover design and office use and have a healthy mix of reads and writes, while for photo editors we have the Adobe Photoshop Heavy trace which is write intensive.