We ran our read/write benchmarks in the following PC:

• Intel i7-920
• Asus P6T Deluxe with 1914 bios
• 3x1GB Crucial PC3-12000 @ 1333MHz (7-7-7-20-1T)
• Seagate 7200.12 500GB 7200rpm
• Windows VISTA x64 SP2 with all latest updated installed

First we used the HD Tach v3.0.1.0 software. This is a popular low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, flash devices, and RAID arrays. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers of software as possible and get as close to the physical performance of the device possible.

We ran the full bench benchmark, which tests every sector of the drive. Full bench uses varying zone sizes for different device sizes to minimize the number of zones benchmarked. The software provides graphics with the average reading/writing performance of the drive. The software reported a very good 30.8MB/sec speed for reading.

Another benchmark utility, the The HD Tune Pro 3.50, confirmed the previous result. This time the drive reached the 29.3MB/sec average speed while reading:

Moving ahead, we used the CrystalDiskMark software and got 27.58MB/sec in the sequential reading and 13.07MB/sec in the sequential writing tests:

Finally we used the ATTO Disk Benchmark tool, which measures the storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. The software uses files ranging from 0.5MB and up to 8MB.

As you can see in the software screen shot below, an 8MB file was written at 14MB/s and read at 27MB/s. Of course, the performance drops as the files used for the tests become smaller: