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Page 6 of 11
Atto V2.34 Disk Benchmark.
Atto is a popular disk benchmarking tool and is relatively flexible, however, for these tests, we are going to use it in its standard form. The first screen shot is Atto, run on the brand new drive, without AHCI installed - Everything looks good.
Brand New Drive.
Mid way through testing, I experienced some fairly significant slow-downs. This was admittedly after a lot of benchmarking and several O/S installs and re-installs. I was unable to see any noticeable drop in speeds from simply using the PC, however, the benchmarks told a different story. It was at this point that I decided to try a low level format - This did improve things slightly, but not by much.
After A Low Lever Format.
I decided to have a bit of an experiment with various software to see if i could restore the drive to it's former glory - Eraser v5.86a is a program I've used for years, it's great for secure removal of data from drives, with several different types of removal and levels of security. I gave the drive a "7 pass DoD wipe" and ran the Atto benchmark again, bingo!
I should point put at this stage that I'm not recommending the use of Eraser 5.86a on your SSD - I take no responsibility for any loss or damage cause by the use of Eraser on your SSD, use it at your own risk! - It is not recommended by Kingston or Intel, but they are now aware of it and are apparently looking into it. Once I know more on the long term effects I will update the review as necessary.
After Erasing.
Finally, I ran Atto again after a fresh install of Vista x64 with AHCI enabled and Intel Matrix Manager installed - Wow! 276 MB/Sec reads and 219 MB/Sec writes! Of course, these are synthetic benchmarks and you are unlikely to see these kind of speeds for day to day use, especially once you have an operating system installed - Still, if you want to do some willy waving, this is a good way of doing it I suppose.
AHCI and Matrix Manager Installed.
Raptor 74GB 16MB Cache.
Samsung 64GB MMCRE64G5MPP-0VA00 Solid State Drive.
Finally, a chart to put the Atto results into perspective.
Next, Everest Disk Benchmarks...
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