Test Setup

• After the 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 gets the same settings without any possible interference from previous testing.
• Our disk image consumes around 58 GB on disk; we resized the partition to fill all available space on the drive.
• Partitions were checked for alignment.
• In order to minimize random variation, each of the real life performance tests is run ten times with reboots in between tests to minimize the impact of disk cache. We used the average of ten runs as the final score.
• All application benchmarks run the actual application and do not replay any disk traces.