iPEAK multitasking
We've developed a series of disk-intensive multitasking tests to highlight the impact of seek times and command queuing on hard drive performance. You can get the low-down on these iPEAK-based tests here. The mean service time of each drive is reported in milliseconds, with lower values representing better performance.

The X25-M gets knocked off its pedestal a little in iPEAK, where even with the latest firmware, the drive is slightly slower overall than the offerings from Corsair and Samsung. The P256 and PB22-J prove faster than the X25-M with workloads that include file copy operations, while the Intel drive comes out ahead when the secondary task is a Virtualdub import.

The OCZ, Super Talent, and Transcend drives are also more competitive with that Virtualdub import as a secondary task, but they're much slower overall than the top three. If we average the mean service time of each drive across all nine workloads, that group of four scores in the 1.55-1.95 millisecond range. The top three, by comparison, are between 0.73 and 0.78 milliseconds.

If you're keeping score, iPEAK is yet another example of how storage controllers define SSD performance. Here, OCZ's Vertex implementation of the Indilinx controller appears to be slightly faster than Super Talent's take on the chip.