This workload uses a trace of importing an image collection to Windows Live Photo Gallery from a USB stick (68 images totaling 434MB). Recording starts at the beginning of importing pictures and ends when thumbnail images appear. During the trace, Windows Live Photo Gallery copies images from the USB stick to the Pictures library, indexes them and creates thumbnails. The 840 Pro and Vertex 450 have been tied for the best results in this test at 30.3MB/s and Samsung’s Evo drives did quite well to land in the 29MB/s to 33MB/s range depending on whether RAPID is on.
This workload uses a trace of compiling a home video from a set of video clips. The source videos were shot with a Sony HDR-HC3 and imported to the PC. A home video project was prepared with Windows Live Movie Maker. Recording started just before clicking Publish (1080p video) and lasted until publishing finished. During the trace Movie Maker read parts of source files and wrote a single output file. The 840 Pro managed 22.8MB/s while the Intel SSD 520 Series gave the best performance at 23.6MB/s. The Evo drives did well to hit 23MB/s – faster than the 840 Pro. Unfortunately, enabling RAPID had no impact on performance.
This workload uses a trace of starting up home and office productivity applications. The PCMark 7 specification 1.0 document was copied to the Desktop. The document was opened by double clicking and few seconds later Internet Explorer was started from the toolbar. Recording started just before double clicking the document and lasted until both applications became responsive. During the trace Windows loaded the executables and related DLLs from the system drive. The 840 Pro has been the king of this test with a throughput of 64.1MB/s, considerably faster than all other SSDs tested, but the Evo drives weren’t significantly slower at 58.8MB/s and 60MB/s. In fact, those figures jumped to 81.8MB/s and 84.3MB/s after enabling RAPID.
This workload uses a trace of loading World of Warcraft. Recording began just before logging in (the character was selected as quickly as possible) and recording stopped right after the game world loaded enough that the character could move. During the trace, the game loaded data from the system drive. The Evo drives managed 16.6MB/s – 1MB/s slower than the 840 Pro – but enabling RAPID gave the 1TB model enough of a push to overtake the veteran drive.
