File Copy Test
File Copy Test is a pseudo-real-world benchmark that times how long it takes to create, read, and copy files in various test patterns. File copying is tested twice: once with the source and target on the same partition, and once with the target on a separate partition. Scores are presented in MB/s.

To make things easier to read, we've busted out our FC-Test results into individual graphs for each test pattern. We'll tackle file creation performance first.

File Copy Test's file creation workload probes the greatest weakness of solid-state drives: write performance. Here, the SATA25 is decimated, failing to even come close to the performance of 2.5" drives spinning at 7,200-RPM. To be fair, however, the SATA25 is between two and three times faster than the original IDE Flash drive.

Now that we've created the files dictated by all these test patterns, let's see how fast the drives can read them.

Solid-state drives prefer to read, and the SATA25 does rather well when FC-Test turns its attention to read performance. The SATA25 easily outdistances the fastest 2.5" drives, and with a couple of test patterns, it dusts all or most of the 3.5" drives we've assembled, too. Perhaps even more striking is the huge performance improvement over the IDE Flash drive, which is roughly a fourth as fast across the board.