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.
• 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.