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 the Intel 510 250GB from the onboard SATA 6GBps controller.
The Hitachi drive certainly feels sluggish, and the CrystalDiskMark results verify our initial real world findings. The 5,400 rpm drive seems to be limited to around 70 MB/s with both sequential read and write tests.