Benchmarks: Real-World Applications
The Windows 7 boot time test is measured from the moment the OS loading screen appears to the time the Windows desktop is fully loaded. As you can see all SSDs perform exceptionally well here and there is very little difference between them.
That was until we tested the Samsung 470 256GB which loaded Windows 7 about 18% faster than the Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB. The result makes the Samsung 470 Series 256GB the fastest SSD we have tested here.
For the application load test we set to launch the following applications into the Windows 7 startup: Internet Explorer, Outlook 2007, Access 2007, Excel 2007, PowerPoint 2007, Publisher 2007, Word 2007 and Photoshop CS4. The test starts when the Windows 7 startup sound loads to the time the final application is loaded.
The Samsung 470 Series 256GB was also very fast here despite being slightly slower than the OCZ Vertex 2 Pro 100GB. With a load time of just 5.2 seconds it was faster than the majority of SSDs and just half a second slower than the OCZ drive.
This test measures the time it takes to launch Adobe Photoshop CS4 from the time we click on the icon to the time the program is completely loaded and ready to use. On an average budget SSD this takes roughly 2 seconds and the Samsung 470 Series 256GB was almost able to halve this taking ~1.2 seconds. This is roughly the same performance we saw from the Crucial C300 drive.
The next batch of results was recorded when loading the last level from the single campaign in StarCraft II. The test begins the second the load screen appears and stopped once the "click to play" message appears.
Using a 3.5" desktop hard drive the game takes around 24 seconds to load this level. The Samsung 470 Series 256GB was 34.1% faster than the hard drive, topping the chart and beating the Crucial drive by 2 seconds.