KitGuru KitGuru.net – Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards
It doesn’t matter how good any of the synthetic suites are, the real meat of the testing has to be under absolute real world conditions. This proves difficult as to record results we have to narrow down fluctuation. Therefore while we would say these are the most useful results to get from this review, there is always going to be a slight margin for error – its not absolutely scientific.
Firstly we installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit Edition onto each of the drives, no programs were installed, just the operating system and a clean update from Microsoft with all patches and security fixes. The machine was then shut down and once started up we recorded boot times – until we reached a working desktop. We used a digital watch for this and repeated the test five times for each drive – once we had these five results we averaged the results and took that for the final figure. We also included a standard £70 Western Digital 1TB hard drive for comparison purposes.
22 seconds is an incredible end result for the F40 40GB drives in Raid 0, this is 2 seconds faster than the Crucial C300 256GB drive, which costs well in excess of £500!
Snow Leopard 10.6.4 Boot Times
Not everyone uses Windows 7, and although TRIM is only supported by this Operating system, I like to expand results a little when possible. I therefore used my Macintosh MacBook pro 17 inch, Generation 5.1 which is based around a 2.93ghz Core 2 Duo processor with 9600m graphics. There is 8GB of DDR3 ram in this machine with a full 3 Gigabit link speed over the nVidia MCP79 AHCI. I also enabled the full 64bit Kernel and Extensions – if you want to read more, check out this article.
Before we show the results it is worth pointing out that we don’t expect to see gains like we did on the Windows 7 platform, because our Macintosh controller is limited to Sata 3Gbps. We also can't run any Raid 0 configurations as the machine only supports a single sata drive.
The Corsair F40 in single drive configuration puts in a good showing at 16.5 seconds, around the same time as other bigger Sandforce drives such as the Agility 2 which we reviewed this week.
