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 500 GB 2.5 inch 5,400 rpm drive.
Sapphire are using a 2.5 inch 5,400 rpm 500GB Western Digital drive with 8MB of cache. This is an entry level unit.
When we reviewed the Edge HD3 earlier this year we commented on the choice of poor, 5,400 rpm 2.5 inch drive and Sapphire have decided to ignore the feedback. Sadly the overall performance of this unit is held back considerably with such a poor drive. It peaks around 95 MB/s write and 81 MB/s read.
In real world terms, the Sapphire Edge VS8 takes around 1 minute to become responsive in Windows 7 after boot and it feels sluggish generally. If they had adopted a 7,200 rpm mechanical drive, this situation wouldn't have been quite as bad.
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 verifies the results found in CrystalDiskMark. The drive peaks around 80-90 MB/s and it feels slow all the time.