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A very important part of overall system responsiveness is down to hard drive performance. We use two of our favourite benchmark utilities Crystalmark X64 Edition and HD Tach to rate performance from the onboard SATA controller. The Dell 14z can be configured with a solid state drive, but our sample was supplied with a 7,200 rpm 750GB Western Digital Scorpio Black Hard Drive.
This is as good as it gets for a 2.5 inch mechanical drive, achieving around 110 MB/s with both sequential read and write tests. It is however much slower than even a budget priced Solid State Drive.
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.
The results in ATTO confirm the CrystalDiskMark findings, peaking around 110 MB/s with both sequential read and write tests. Dell offer a 256GB SSD option for around £180 more (£1,178.99) and we feel it would really benefit this particular system as we found it could be sluggish to respond due to the mechanical hard drive.
Nice little machine, my friend bought one. agree on the screen though. Apple have the edge there by a long shot. the 13 inch macbook air screen is GORGEOUS quality.
The two tone design is lovely, they put a lot of effort into the machine and I like the centralised track pad. shame about the screen, but I dont mind TN screens, i use one on my own machine for work and its fine.