GSkill Titan/WD Scorpio Comparison

738 Views 21 Replies 4 Participants Last post by devsk, Mar 15, 2009

Joeking78

Discussion Starter · Mar 13, 2009

My GSkill Titan 256GB was shipped today and will arrive tomorrow

I just wanted to create a thread comparing my new drive against a 7200RPM WD Scorpio, probably an unfair comparison but oh well.

I'll compare the following:

OS boot time (Vista 64)
Read & write times (Sisandra)
Access times (Sisandra)

I'll carry out the SSD test firstly on a fresh install of Vista 64 and then carry out the test with the following known SSD tweaks to see if they actually make a difference:

Prefetch (disabled), Superfetch (disabled), Indexing (disabled), Write Caching (disabled), Short File Names (disabled), NTFS Timestamp (disabled)

The tests I carry out on the WD Scorpio will have the same tweaks applied that are relevant to the drive. Short File Names & NTFS Timestamp will not be disabled.

I'll post back shortly with details on the WD Scorpio

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Joeking78

Discussion Starter · #2 · Mar 13, 2009

Ok, results for WD Scorpio below.

OS Boot Time - 50 seconds
Read Performance - 62.002MB/s
Write Performance - N/A (drive not empty)
Access Time - 16ms
WEI - 5.7

If you have any suggestions for tests I could carry out please let me know. I was thinking of games but I only have 2 installed right now, Battlefield 2 & Empire Total War and they both run off EA Downloader and Steam respectively

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devsk

· #3 · Mar 13, 2009

Those stats will be slaughtered by any modern SSD. Titan run two in raid0 internally, so expecte a massacre.

Joeking78

Discussion Starter · #4 · Mar 13, 2009

Yep, I'm expecting it

I was just going to bench without posting any details but I thought I'd share the information here for anyone that cared.

I'm really hoping to see a big difference.

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devsk

· #5 · Mar 13, 2009

Quote:

Originally Posted by Joeking78

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I'm really hoping to see a big difference.

expect it only in boot/startup of apps, and in benchmarks. the jmicron controller on there does get bogged down under multi-tasking load. So, don't expect good results if you are going to multi-task your disk like run a virus scanner, run mp3's off it, and then install a program, all at the same time.

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Joeking78

Discussion Starter · #6 · Mar 13, 2009

Quote:

Originally Posted by devsk

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expect it only in boot/startup of apps, and in benchmarks. the jmicron controller on there does get bogged down under multi-tasking load. So, don't expect good results if you are going to multi-task your disk like run a virus scanner, run mp3's off it, and then install a program, all at the same time.

I rarely do more than a few things at a time anyway.

Would I see difference in benchmark programs like 3DMark?

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devsk

· #7 · Mar 13, 2009

2

Quote:

Originally Posted by Joeking78

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I rarely do more than a few things at a time anyway.

Would I see difference in benchmark programs like 3DMark?

definitely! You will see a change in every benchmark that accesses disk a lot. So, game loading will be faster.

BTW, I have the previous generation SSD. And Titan is pretty much the latest in the tech. So, apart from the multi-tasking, I expect it to really impress you, particularly coming from scorpio....

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ChickenInferno

· #8 · Mar 13, 2009

You will see a boost in load times, but I doubt a boost in scores. I doubt your hdd is bottlenecking your RAM or your GPU Ram. I wouldn't plan on a score increase or a very modest one if there is an increase.

Joeking78

Discussion Starter · #9 · Mar 13, 2009

3

Quote:

Originally Posted by devsk

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definitely! You will see a change in every benchmark that accesses disk a lot. So, game loading will be faster.

BTW, I have the previous generation SSD. And Titan is pretty much the latest in the tech. So, apart from the multi-tasking, I expect it to really impress you, particularly coming from scorpio....

I've read a review on the Titan and it performed really well, faster than the Intel Extreme in some areas. I'm looking forward to benchmarking tomorrow morning

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Joeking78

Discussion Starter · #10 · Mar 14, 2009

6

Its arrived

Going to install it later after Liverpool beat Man Utd this afternoon

and then I'll post some benchmarks

Got some pictures below

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Villainstone

· #11 · Mar 14, 2009

Yeah SSD's are great. I started with 2 and now have 4, soon I just might add 2 more. 6 30GB SSD's all I can say is FAST.

Joeking78

Discussion Starter · #12 · Mar 14, 2009

2

Quote:

Originally Posted by Villainstone

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Yeah SSD's are great. I started with 2 and now have 4, soon I just might add 2 more. 6 30GB SSD's all I can say is FAST.

I'm not jealous much

I wish I had the space to have 2 in raid 0 but thats one of the downsides of notebook computing. At least I know at 200mb/s read-160mb/s write I have the fastest single harddrive solution for a notebook, with a fair amount of space too...although I think the 256gb Samsung and the Patriot Warp are faster but they are more expensive

How do your drives perform, whats the stats for 4 in raid 0? Also, did you do much tweaking? I've seen a whole bunch of tweals the get the best out of SSD's

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Joeking78

Discussion Starter · #13 · Mar 14, 2009

Ok its installed now and I have some stats.

OS Boot Time - 26 seconds - 50 seconds with the Scorpio
WEI - 5.9 - up from 5.7 (harddrive score only)

Pretty pleased with the boot time. Vista took 20 minutes 30 seconds to install from pressing the install button to the final reboot, does anyone know if thats good or not? I can't remember how long it took with the Scorpio.

I have one question...its a 256GB drive but when I was installing Vista, at the format screen, it only showed 236GB. In the harrdrive tab in My Computer it shows 215GB available of 236GB (after drivers & windows updates). Could anyone explain the 20GB missing?

Cheers

devsk

· #14 · Mar 14, 2009

Likely calculation is:

Industry uses 1KByte as decimal 1000 instead of binary 1024 i.e. 256000000000/(1024*1024*1024)=238

And then there is reservation for wear leveling. 238 minus 1% for wear leveling = 236.

devsk

· #15 · Mar 14, 2009

post crystal mark, iometer or sisoft sandra stats.

Reactions: 1

Joeking78

Discussion Starter · #16 · Mar 14, 2009

Got some results using HD Tune Pro.

Read

Minimum: 115.2 MB/s
Maximum: 185.2 MB/s
Average: 157.1 MB/s
Access time: 0.2 ms
Burst rate: 150.7 MB/s

I think those results are ok. I compared them with a review over at Bjorn3D and my results are slightly better

Joeking78

Discussion Starter · #17 · Mar 14, 2009

2

Quote:

Originally Posted by devsk

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Likely calculation is:

Industry uses 1KByte as decimal 1000 instead of binary 1024 i.e. 256000000000/(1024*1024*1024)=238

And then there is reservation for wear leveling. 238 minus 1% for wear leveling = 236.

Thanks mate

I did read it somewhere but completey forgot about it.

I'll post Sisandra results in a few minutes

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Joeking78

Discussion Starter · #18 · Mar 14, 2009

Results using Sisandra.

Read

Drive index: 165.07 MB/s
Random access time: 1ms

Thats about all the info I could find on Sisandra

Joeking78

Discussion Starter · #19 · Mar 15, 2009

3

Quote:

Originally Posted by devsk

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post crystal mark, iometer or sisoft sandra stats.

Here's Crystal Disk Mark.

4K looks very slow. Should I be worried about that or is it normal?

EDIT: Just found the answer to my own question.

It seems the JMicron controller is a bit of a bottle neck when it comes to 4K writes. Shame. But its fast as hell at sequential & 512K

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devsk

· #20 · Mar 15, 2009

Quote:

Originally Posted by Joeking78

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Here's Crystal Disk Mark.

4K looks very slow. Should I be worried about that or is it normal?

It is still better than any HDD you can get hold of. My raptor can't do better 1MB/s in read and 2.5MB/s in write for the 4k test. Raptors in RAID0 do slightly better in write. But that crystal mark result looks much better than I expected. You may not see much stutter if that performance holds over time.

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