Benchmark: PCMark Vantage
PCMark Vantage: Run 1 |
PCMark Vantage: Run 3 |
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The synthetic benchmarks thus far have shown that the Accelerator cache won't operate at the speeds available to high-end standalone SSDs, but it does make a hard disk perform significantly faster.
PCMark Vantage is a good example of this. The benchmark simulates real-world usage scenarios and there's a stark contrast between runs. As shown in the screengrabs at the top of the page, drive performance is increased dramatically between the first and third runs - the Dataplax software has picked up on the files being used, and they've been moved to the SSD for quick access.
In the end, Windows Startup performance goes from 20.9MB/s to 129.2MB/s, and application loading performance jumps from just 5.5MB/s to a very respectable 125.9MB/s.
Not everything will be immediately faster (even a sizeable 60GB cache has its limits), but once the Accelerator knows your usage patterns, things speed up significantly. The performance bump is handy to say the least, but Corsair's 60GB drive faces one obvious problem; OCZ's Synapse is faster and costs only £5 more, though, Corsair's available cache is twice the size and that may be a factor if you use a large selection of apps on a regular basis.
