SSD Roundup August 2009

Black Magic Disk Speed

Black Magic Design make a number of industry leading video capture cards, including those which can capture HD material at very high data rates. As a result having a disk with a fast write speed is essential. To aid users in configuring their system for optimal captures Black Magic include a utility with their hardware which records the real world disk speed and gives the framerate available for that speed.

When testing the ability to write data we see that the Indilinx based drives from Crucial and OCZ offer some excellent performance. Write speeds are in excess of the advertised speeds which is great and in the case of the Vertex Turbo we can see a clear advantage from the increased speed of this product. Its write performance is the highest from a single drive in this test.

The Corsair P128 doesn’t quite match the Indilinx based drives however its higher sustained write of 200MB/s compared to a maximum of 120mb/s on the other drives would give performance benefits when recording longer video streams. Looking at the Corsair RAID 0 results the performance is exceptional, framerates are well in excess of 60fps and even when we tested at 10Bit quality they remained well above 30fps.