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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.
This is the first OCZ drive to beat the Intel X25-M 160GB in our boot test, even if it is by only half a second. The single OCZ drive is only 1.5 seconds behind the Raid 0 X25 V configuration which is an incredible result.
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.
The OCZ Agility 2 120GB performs exactly the same under OSX as the Vertex 2 did under our test conditions. This is only half a second slower than the Crucial C300, but it is worth pointing out that our Macintosh does not have a full SATA 600 connection meaning it is limited to the controller bandwidth.
