LSI WarpDrive 300GB PCI Express SSD Review


Test System SANDRA Physical Disk Tests

Our Test MethodologiesUnder each test condition, the Solid State Drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a standard spinning hard disk for the OS and benchmark installations.  The SSDs were left blank without partitions wherever possible, unless a test required them to be partitioned and formatted, as was the case with our ATTO, Vantage, and CrystalDiskMark benchmark tests. Windows firewall, automatic updates and screen savers were all disabled before testing. In all test runs, we rebooted the system and waited several minutes for drive activity to settle before invoking a test.

HotHardware Test System
Intel Core i7 and SSD Powered

Processor -

Motherboard -


Video Card -

Memory -

Audio -

Hard Drives -

 

Hardware Used:
Intel Core i7-970


Gigabyte GA-EX58 Extreme
(X58 Chipset)


NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285

6144MB Kingston DDR3-1333

Integrated on board

WD Caviar Black 1TB (OS Drive)
LSI WarpDrive 300GB PCIe
OCZ RevoDrive X2 240GB PCIe
OCZ RevoDrive 120GB PCIe
OCZ IBIS 240GB HSDL
Fusion-io ioDrive 160GB
Fusion-io ioXtreme 80GB PCIe
OCZ Vertex LE 100GB Sandforce-base SATA SSD

OS -
Chipset Drivers -
DirectX -

Video Drivers
-


Relevant Software:
Windows 7 Ultimate x64
Intel 9.1.1.1025
DirectX 11

NVIDIA GeForce 260.99

Benchmarks Used:
IOMeter 2008
ATTO v2.46
CrystalDiskMark v3
PCMark Vantage
SiSoftware Sandra 2010 SP3
HH Custom File Transfer Tests

SiSoft SANDRA 2011
Synthetic HDD Benchmarking

For our first set of tests, we used SiSoft SANDRA, the the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. Here, we used the Physical Disk test suite and provided the results from our comparison SSDs. The benchmarks were run without formatting and read and write performance metrics are detailed below.

SANDRA's purely sequential and rather short read/write test doesn't paint the WarpDrive in an all that impressive light.  Its performance is decent, perhaps two times that of the average SSD but only marginally faster than OCZ's first gen RevoDrive.  Write speeds for the WarpDrive are definitely its strong suit, according to SANDRA.  However, as you'll see many of the tests moving forward here, this quick and dirty view of the WarpDrive's performance is hardly representative of what the drive is capable of.

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