MSI GX60 Gaming Laptop Review (A10-4600M/HD7970M)

A very important part of overall system responsiveness is down to hard drive performance. We use two of our favourite benchmark utilities Crystalmark X64 Edition and HD Tach to rate performance from the onboard 256GB SanDisk SATA drive.

The 7,200 rpm mechanical drive peaks around 120 MB/s which is as good as we could expect from a 2.5 inch performance hard drive. Sadly MSI haven't outfitted this particular machine with a Solid State Drive, and it is the GX60's most glaring weakness.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

ATTO drive performance is similar to the CrystalDiskMark results, shown above.

Real world performance is noticeably slow at times as the drive struggles to keep up with an active gaming system. I would personally mirror the internal drive to a 120GB or 240GB 2.5 inch Solid State Drive – swap the drives out and use the internal 750GB unit inside an external USB enclosure for backup duties.

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