SSD Performance Real World Benchmarks

Trace benchmarks

To provide a more precise view of SSD performance in the real world, we run trace benchmarks, which are tests that simulate the use of real apps. We employ traces from Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Indesign, Adobe After Effects, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, World of Warcraft, and Battlefield 3 in the next three pages of benchmarks. The following two pages include the results of all individual tests. We consider these three pages to be the most representative collection of tests for a consumer.

The graphs below illustrate a bandwidth score, which is the average read and write transfer speed for all ten application traces. These traces are played and recorded in real-time, including the idle period associated with the initial disk usage recording. The aggregate score is calculated using the geometric mean time required to run all tests, including idle time. This is why the results of all current SSDs are so similar when using the standard score.