HyperX Savage 240GB SSD Review and RAID Performance Testing

Sandra is a software collection of synthetic benchmarks that will give us a basic idea as to what a system is capable of. It should be noted that SiSoft numbers can change depending on what hardware is being tested.  These were recorded using Sandra Professional Version 21.15.2015.1

ATTO Disk Benchmark is a freeware disk benchmarking utility that can test a variety of storage solutions from single hard drives to multi level RAID arrays and solid state disks.  The tests can be broken down to transfer sizes between 512B to 64MB with lengths between 64KB and 32GB.  Testing results are shown on a transfer chart with reads and writes clearly marked.

For our benchmark the 64MB transfer is being recorded.

Crystal Disk Mark is a widely available disk benchmarking program that can test a variety of different scenarios from Sequential to Random with Multiple and Single queues.

For our tests the Sequential and Random test with multiple queues and threads will be recorded.

PCMark 8 is an overall system benchmark to measure and compare PC performance using real-world tasks and applications. There are six individual testing scenarios using applications that reflect typical PC use in the home and at the office.  This approach ensures that PCMark measures the things that matter, highlighting performance differences that will be apparent to end users and consumers.

SYSmark 2014 ver 1.5 is an application-based benchmark that reflects usage patterns of business users in the areas of office productivity, media creation, and data/financial analysis and features the latest and most popular applications from each of their respective fields.    

We have some rather surprising results here.  Some are expected while others kinda make you scratch your head.  For starters let’s look at RAID performance. 

RAID 0 is a stripe set that puts half the data on one drive and the other half on another.  Both read and write performance increase because the controller can use both drives in parallel. 

RAID 1 is a mirror set and basically duplicates the data across drives.  It can read from both drives to increase performance but has to write at the speed of a single drive.

Looking at these benchmarks you can clearly see the benefits of using RAID to increase performance and that three drives in a RAID 0 is actually faster than our M.2 PCI Express SSD.

The real surprise comes with the real world benchmarks using PCMark 8 and SYSmark 2014.  You would expect to see higher performance however in both instances the scores are only showing a marginal gain proving that even with large jumps in performance it doesn’t always translate into astounding real world performance.