Here is our testbed:

• Shuttle SH81R4
  Processor: Intel i7 4790Graphics card: Club3D Radeon HD 6790 CoolStream EditionMemory: 2x8GB RAM DDR3-1600 CrucialSSD: 512GB Crucial MX100Monitor: LG L246WH-BH 24"
• Windows 7 x64 SP1 with latest updates installed

For the tests, we used the following software:

• HDTachRW v3.0.1.0HD Tune v4.50 ProCrystal DiskMark v3ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.46 ASS SSD Benchmark 1.5xxxIOMeter v2006.07.27 with Xtreme Benchmark templatePCMark Professional edition v1.04
• Anvil Storage Utilities 1.0.34. Beta 11

We start the tests with the HDTachRW software. The software measures the sequential read speed, the random access speed and sequential write speed.

The drive returned a 382.3 MB/s and 411.6 MB/s on average for sequential write and read, respectively. The performance is higher than what we had seen with the MX100 512GB or the M550 models, mainly in the write part:

We move on to the HD Tune Pro software, another utility we used to measure the drive's reading and writing performances. Although not necessarily representative of real-world workloads, HD Tune's targeted tests give us a glimpse of each drive's raw capabilities.

This time the sequential reading test returned a 223.9MB/s average speed:

As you see in the screenshot below, writing was not stable across the data sequence and the reading speed started to decrease after the 153MB mark of the graph, resulting to a low overall average writing speed (257.4 MB/s). That's exactly the same behavior we had experienced when we tested the MX100 512GB SSD: