Alienware Aurora R7 (i7-8700 & GTX 1080) System Review

CrystalDiskMark 5.1.1 is an industry standard benchmark for testing the raw speed of a storage device. It uses a test file to variously write data to or read data from the drive, checking for sequential read and write speed and random read and write performance, with it also testing performance at various queue depths. The size of the test file can be selected from 50MB to 32GB. We test using the default 1GB file size.

The Toshiba SSD in this PC (C:) is mighty fast when it comes to read speeds but our CrystalDiskMark test showed it struggles significantly when it comes to write speed. We tested this multiple times to verify it really is this slow and it consistently came out with the same result. We suspect this is at least in part because of the relatively small size of the drive, and that the 500GB version would be much faster.

The effect of this relatively slow performance won't necessarily be that obvious in day to day use, but it's still a significant black mark against the system overall, especially given the cost of the larger SSD options.

Meanwhile, the secondary hard drive (D:) provides fairly typical hard drive performance. It's just there for seldom-accessed bulk data and it gets the job done.

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