We continue our benchmarks using the Crucial Adrenaline SSD as a regular, non-caching solution, without using the DataPlex software.

The next software we used was the ATTO Disk Benchmark. The tool measures storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. The benchmark performs file transfers ranging from 0.5 KB to 8192 KB. ATTO can be adjusted to do overlapped I/O, in a variety of queue depths. We tested the SSD using the benchmark's default settings, using 256KB file length performance and QD4. ATTO probably gives the most accurate results for compressible read and write data.

The writing performance of the drive was almost steady at around 114 MB/s for files bigger than 4KB. Reading was also high at 500-540 MB/s with files bigger than 128KB. The drive returned a fantastic reading performance with small compressible files:

Here is a comparison of the Crucial Adrenaline SSD with other SSDs. It is obvious that the Adrenaline SSD is very fast when reading small compressible files, leaving behind other cache SSDs such as OCZ's Synapse:

On the other hand, writing of small compressible files was not so easy for the Crucial drive:

With larger files (2MB) the drive was also fast during reading but remained slow in the corresponding writing test:

We proceed to IOMeter benchmark. Iometer is run by using workstation and database patterns for queue depths (outstanding I/Os) of two and 32, representing very light and moderate loads. Iometer is both a workload generator (that is, it performs I/O operations in order to stress the system) and a measurement tool (that is, it examines and records the performance of its I/O operations and their impact on the system). The app's ability to bombard drives with an escalating number of concurrent IO requests also does a nice job of simulating the sort of demanding multi-user environments that are common in enterprise applications. It can be used for measurement of the performance of an SSD. We run the IOMeter tests using the Xtreme Benchmark template .

With just 3692.11 combined IOPS, the Adrenaline is a not as fast as we expected, but don't forget that it's just a 50GB SSD. Here is where the drive stands compared to other SSDs:

Below you see the results of Futuremark's PCMark 7 Professional edition. The software includes 7 PC tests for Windows 7, combining more than 25 individual workloads.

The drive scored 4406 points. Below you see the performance of the Crucial Adrenaline SSD in various tasks defined by the software: