Benchmarks: PCmark 7
This workload uses a trace of importing a collection of images in Windows Live Photo Gallery. A USB stick with 68 images (434MB 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.
For the importing pictures test the Crucial Adrenaline improved the performance of the Western Digital RE4 1TB by over 2.5x taking the bandwidth from 7.8MB/s to a more impressive 21MB/s. This performance boost put the Adrenaline + RE4 1TB combo on par with the Patriot Pyro 120GB.
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 Western Digital RE4 1TB wasn't that slow in the video editing test providing a bandwidth of 19.5MB/s making it just 4MB/s slower than the fastest SSDs tested. Still the Crucial Adrenaline was able to provide a 16% performance boost. Interestingly running the test multiple times was not required for the Adrenaline to achieve maximum performance.
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.
Again we see the Crucial Adrenaline only required one pass to achieve maximum performance. Incredibly in the starting applications test the Adrenaline was able to speed the Western Digital RE4 1TB up by 18x. In our own custom application load tests we also saw significant performance improvements.