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 uses the same settings without any interference from previous testing.
• Our disk image consumes roughly 200 GB—we re-sized the partition to fill all available space on the drive.
• Partitions are properly aligned.
• In order to minimize random variation, each real-life performance test is run twelve times with reboots in-between tests to minimize the impact of disk cache. We exclude the top and bottom outliers and use the average of the remaining ten runs as the final score.
• All application benchmarks run the actual application and do not replay any disk traces.