Test Setup

• After initial configuration and installation we created a disk image that will be used to test every drive.
• Automated updates were disabled for all programs. This ensures that for every review each drive will get the same starting point without possible pollution from previous testing.
• Our disk image consumes around 25 GB on disk, we resized the partition to fill all available space on the drive.
• Partitions were checked to be aligned.
• In order to minimize random variation, each of the performance tests is run ten times, with reboots in between tests to minimize the impact of disk cache. This approach also serves to put the drive into a "used" state with data constantly being written and read from the disk and TRIM active.
• We used the average of the ten runs as final score.
• All application benchmarks run the actual application and do not replay any disk traces.