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 25 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 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.