HD Tach
We tested HD Tach with the benchmark's full variable zone size setting.

HD Tach's pedal-to-the-floor sustained throughput drag races nicely put the X25-E's transfer rates into perspective. The Extreme is shadowed by the X25-M in the read speed test, but it's all alone in the lead when we look at writes. What's particularly impressive here is that the X25-E actually exceeds its supposed maximum write speed of 170MB/s by nearly 38MB/s. Perhaps even more striking is the fact that the VelociRaptor is at least 100MB/s behind in both tests.

The Extreme retains the lead through HD Tach's burst speed test, although it doesn't have much of an advantage over the competition here.

All three of our solid-state drives share the lead here, flexing their huge access latency advantage over mechanical hard drives. This test only tracks random access times down to a tenth of a millisecond, so it doesn't expose any differences in performance between the SSDs.

While the Extreme's CPU utilization is the highest of the lot, keep in mind that HD Tach's margin of error in this test is +/- 2%.