Vista boot-up time, game-loading time, performance summary
| Vista boot-up time | ||
|---|---|---|
| Samsung Spinpoint F1-DT 750GB | Intel X25-M SSD 80GB | Corsair P256 SSD 256GB |
| 73.11 | 42.25 | 43.85 |
For the Vista boot-up test we hand-time a cold boot until the WEI page can be loaded. The files on the three hard drives are identical. The SSDs are simply quicker, clearly.
| Far Cry 2 loading benchmark loading times | ||
|---|---|---|
| Samsung Spinpoint F1-DT 750GB | Intel X25-M SSD 80GB | Corsair P256 SSD 256GB |
| 56.4 | 49.15 | 50 |
And the game-loading test takes into account the time elapsed from launching Far Cry 2's benchmark - used in our graphics-card reviews - until the game becomes active. There's a clear, repeatable lead for the SSDs.
Results summary
Most commentators passing judgement on storage have been in general agreement that Intel's X25-M 80GB drive - and more so the X25-E - is the benchmark by which all other reasonably-priced storage should be judged. Blazing-fast transfer speeds and excellent small-file performance has made it a winner. Since its release, other SSD manufacturers have been playing a game of performance catch-up, often failing to match the X25 in most areas.
Corsair's range-heading P256 drive beats out the Intel drive in two respects straight off the bat. Its larger capacity and better price-to-performance ratio make it appealing, but all that counts for nought if it can't deliver performance in spades.
The P256's read performance is pretty close to the Intel drive's but doesn't get up to the 220MB/s claimed by Corsair. Still, it's plenty fast at both sequential and random reads of various sizes, as evinced by the Iometer and h2benchw results.
Sustained (large block) write performance is easily better than X25-M's, but the P256 has to give way when running random small-size writes: nothing touches the well-tuned Intel SSD here.
All in all, the Corsair P256 is a high-performance SSD that's pretty good in most areas and only partially letdown by sub-Intel random write speeds.
