Sapphire EDGE HD4 Mini PC Review

Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0 x64. We are testing the onboard 320 GB 2.5 inch 5,400 rpm drive.

Sadly Sapphire are using another slow 5,400rpm 2.5 inch drive which drags down the overall performance of the system, considerably. We keep feeding back to Sapphire that they should release a version with an SSD inside. A small SSD based EDGE PC wouldn't actually cost much more than a larger mechanical version, considering the recent price drops of solid state technology.

In real world terms, the EDGE HD4 takes well over a minute to boot from cold and become responsive in Windows 7. Generally it feels sluggish and applications will take some time to load. Performance in Crystalmark is rated around the 75 MB/S mark for both read and write tests, which is slower than the performance from the VS8, which was already less than stellar. Even the adoption of a quality 7,200 rpm drive would improve this situation a little.

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 shows the same miserable levels of performance, peaking at around 80 MB/s in both sequential read and write. We really would remove this drive, put it into an external USB enclosure and use it for storage. Fitting a quality Solid State Drive into this system would transform it dramatically.

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