Hey everyone-
I just purchased this W510, and I love it!
I also purchased a Corsair F120 120GB SSD and a Patriot Gauntlet USB 3.0 enclosure for storage of files. In running initial tests on this drive with HD Tune Pro, I found the following:
1) Sequential read: Internal HDD starts off at ~97 MB/sec and tapers off to ~60% of that speed as the test runs out to the edge of the platter. SSD, on the other hand, is a constant ~94 MB/sec or so, and equals the performance of the HDD when the HDD is about at the 100GB mark (500GB drive).
2) Sequential write: Internal HDD is still just under 100 MB/sec to start, but the SSD only delivers about 50 MB/sec.
Now this is a newer Sandforce SSD capable of over 250 MB/sec transfer rates, so I know the bottleneck isn't the SSD. Also, I read test writeup here: http://www.guru3d.com/article/msi-star-usb-3-controller-test/9 where a USB 3.0 card installed in a desktop PC performed MUCH better with an external SSD connected, at almost twice the read speed and 3x the write speed that I experienced, using the same test software. Finally, let's assume the SSD is limited to the same throughput as the internal hard drive for some odd reason... why would the write speed to the SSD be cut in half? In any case, I would expect higher performance from a 250 MB/sec drive on a 5Gigabit interface connected to a PCI bus vs. an HDD capable of around 100 MB/sec on a 3 gigabit interface on the same PCI bus.
Any ideas on what might be going on here? Can I actually expect higher performance? At this point, I'd be happy to match the performance of the internal hard drive!
My USB 3.0 controller driver is version 1.0.19.0, which I believe is current.
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid=MIGR-74435
Thanks,
-Rodney
Rodney Sparks
Creative Spark Engineering, Inc.
http://www.cs-eng.us
