Asus Sabertooth 990FX Motherboard Review

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 the SSD and HDD.

The OCZ Vertex 3 SSD is a fantastic performance drive and it highlights the benefits of moving to one of the new Sandforce powered units.

I have been using HDTach for many years now and always find it is an invaluable benchmark to ascertain potential levels of performance. HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives (ZIP/JAZZ), flash devices, and RAID arrays. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers of software as possible and get close to the physical performance of the device.

An average measured speed of around 375 MB/s is a good score for HDTach, even though it falls far short of the actual drive's real world performance levels.

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