This workload uses a trace of importing an collection of 68 images (434MB) from a USB stick to Windows Live Photo Gallery. Recording activity on the system drive started when we began 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. Here the Plextor M6e was able to match the Vertex 460 while the M6M and M6S were slightly slower.
This workload uses a trace of compiling a home video from a set of 1080i MPEG-2 video clips shot with a Sony HDR-HC3 and imported to the PC. A home video project was prepared with Windows Live Movie Maker and recording activity on the 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. All three Plextor SSDs delivered the same 23MB/s in the video editing test making them 1MB/s slower than the fastest SSDs tested here.
This workload uses a trace of starting up home and office productivity applications. The PCMark 7 specification 1.0 document was copied to the desktop, the document was opened by double clicking and few seconds later Internet Explorer was started from the toolbar. Recording activity on the 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. The Plextor M6e matched the OCZ RevoDrive 350 in the starting applications test with 69MB/s while the M6S and M6M were also very fast hitting 61MB/s.
The last test uses a trace of launching World of Warcraft. We install the game, create a character and then restart the program. Recording activity on the system drive started just before logging into the game and was stopped right after the game world had loaded so far that the character could move. During the trace, the game loaded game data from the system drive. This time all three Plextor SSDs delivered the exact same result of 17MB/s, enough said.
