Test System

Motherboard: ASUS P6T7 WS SuperComputer (Supplied by ASUS)
Processors: Intel 975 EE (Supplied by AVADirect)
Memory: Corsair Dominator 1600 MHz Triple Channel Kit
Graphics Card: Leadtek Quadro FX1700 (Supplied by Leadtek)
Enclosure: Lian Li V2000
Cooling: Noctua NH-U12P SE2 (Supplied by Noctua)
SAS Controller: LSI MegaRAID SAS 9260-8i (Supplied by LSI)
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate X64

You can read more about TweakTown's Storage Product Testing Workstation and the procedures followed to test products in this article.

For today's tests we went back to the ASUS P6T7 WS SuperComputer for all but the SATA 6G C300 benchmarks. While testing the GIGABYTE X58A-UD7, we found an issue that effects solid state drives on this board. In our first chart of the C300 we noticed that one test in PC Mark Vantage ran extremely slow. At the time we wrote it off as an issue with the C300's firmware, but further testing exonerated the C300 as the cause. A big thanks goes out to Olin from Benchmark Reviews for helping us with re-testing. GIGABYTE is currently investigating the issue that seems to affect the C300, Indilinx Barefoot and X25-M in this one test.

What makes this test interesting is that the Intel ICH SATA 3G ports have been proven to perform up to 10% faster than the Marvell SATA 6G ports with high speed SATA 3G drives. When I started the testing I knew there would be a very good chance that the Intel SATA 3G performance may very well be higher than the Marvell 6G. Let's get to it.

ATTO Baseline Performance

Version and / or Patch Used: 2.34

ATTO is used by many disk manufacturers to determine the read and write speeds that will be presented to customers.

ATTO shows us read speeds that are limited by SATA 3G and this is something we expected since the Crucial RealSSD C300 is the first drive that actually makes use of the available head room of 6G. The write speeds are a hair faster on the Marvell SATA 6G, but the results are nearly identical and within the margin of error.