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.

The Vertex 3 is extremely fast to load Windows 7, clocking 8.8 seconds from an average of three runs. In fact, OCZ's new drive didn't let us see the Windows logo in full on the load screen – we just saw four dots, what a shame.

For the application load test, we launch the following applications on Windows' 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.

All the SSDs perform exceptionally well here and there is very little difference between them. The OCZ Vertex 2 Pro 100GB is the fastest SSD we have clocked from an average of three runs taking just 4.7 seconds. The new Vertex 3 240GB was equally impressive taking 4.8 seconds, while the Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB took 5.1 seconds.

This test measures the time it takes to launch Adobe Photoshop CS4. This used to be an excellent test for SSDs in the early days, but with so many drives loading in roughly one second it's hard to tell them apart now. The OCZ Vertex 3 240GB matched the Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB and Samsung 470 Series 256GB.

The next batch of results was recorded while loading the last level of StarCraft II's single player campaign. The test begins as the loading screen appears and stops once the "click to play" message appears.

Whereas a typical hard drive takes around 24 seconds, most SSDs only get this time down to around 20 seconds, such as the new Intel SSD 320 Series 300GB drive. The OCZ Vertex 2 Pro 100GB and Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB managed to pull the trick in 18 seconds each, while the Samsung 470 Series 256GB took 16 seconds.

We were stunned to see that after three test runs the Vertex 3 240GB took an average of just 9.5 seconds to load the same StarCraft II level. That's unbelievably fast as the drive was able to load the level in half the time it took the RealSSD C300 256GB.