Benchmarks: PCmark 7
This workload uses a trace of Windows Defender's Quick scan of the system. Recording of activity on system drive started just before clicking Quick scan on Windows Defender and lasted until the scan finished.
As you can see the majority of SSDs delivered between 5.1 - 5.7MB/s with the Samsung 830 Series 512GB pretty much in the middle with 5.3MB/s.
This workload uses a trace of importing a collection of images in Windows Live Photo Gallery. A USB stick with 68 images (434 MB total) was inserted and images were imported to Windows Live Photo Gallery. Recording of activity on system drive started at the beginning of importing pictures and lasted until thumbnail images appeared on the display. During the trace Windows Live Photo Gallery copied images from USB stick to Pictures library, indexed them and created thumbnails.
The Samsung 830 Series 512GB performed very well here delivering 28.6MB/s making it the fastest SSD tested and 2% faster than the OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS 240GB.
This workload uses a trace of compiling a home video from a set of video clips. The source videos were shot with a Sony HDR-HC3 and imported to the PC. The source video was 1080i MPEG-2 videos. A home video project was prepared with Windows Live Movie Maker. Recording of activity on system drive started just before clicking Publish (1080p video) and lasted until publishing finished. During the trace Movie Maker read parts of source files and wrote a single output file.
The results from this test were all very close and again the Samsung 830 Series 512GB was found in the middle of the pack with a throughput of 22.5MB/s.
This workload uses a trace of Media Center activity. PC was equipped with a dual DVB-T tuner. A movie was recorded and after the recording had finished, two simultaneous recordings were started and playback of the first movie was started. While maintaining this setup of two movies streaming to storage and one being played back, activity on system drive was recorded for 4 minutes. During the trace Media Center read one file and wrote two others.
Not a lot can be said here, the Samsung 830 Series 512GB managed 8.2MB/s allowing it to match the performance of the other high-end SSDs.
This workload uses a trace of adding music to media library. On another PC, a hard drive was filled with 68 GB of music files (lossless WMA). The hard drive was connected to the PC recording the trace. Windows Media Player was started and the music folder in the new drive was added to Music Library. Recording of activity on system drive started just before adding the folder to Library and lasted until Windows Media Player status bar read "Update Complete". During the trace Media Player scanned music files on the added hard drive (which is not included in the trace since the activity did not happen in the system drive) and indexed them (which is included in the trace since index files are located in the system drive).
The Samsung 830 Series 512GB managed 1.4MB/s as did virtually every other SSD tested.
This workload uses a trace of starting up home and office productivity applications. PCMark 7 specification 1.0 document was copied to Desktop. The document was opened by double clicking and few seconds later Internet Explorer was started from the toolbar. Recording of activity on system drive started just before double clicking the document and lasted until both applications had started and became responsive. During the trace Windows loaded the executables and related DLLs from the system drive.
Here the Samsung 830 Series 512GB managed 45.5MB/s making it 40% faster than the 470 Series 256GB. It was 3% slower than the Crucial m4 256GB and 23% slower than the OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS 240GB.
This workload uses a trace of starting up World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft was installed. A new character was created in the game. The game was closed and started again. Recording of activity on system drive started just before logging in the game. Game loaded and the new character was selected as quickly as possible. The recording was stopped right after the game world had loaded so far that the character could move in the world. During the trace the game loaded game data from the system drive.
Finally the PCmark7 gaming test, here the Samsung 830 Series 512GB got in-between the Crucial m4 256GB and the OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS 240GB.