A very important part of overall system responsiveness is down to hard drive performance so we used two of our favourite benchmark utilities Crystalmark X64 Edition and HD Tach. We are using a 6Gb/s capable connector which is controlled by the Marvel 9182 chipset.
Sata 6Gb throughput is fantastic, especially when used in combination with the 256gb Crucial C300 SSD, averaging well over 300MB/s from a single drive.