Our testing methods
Our test rig's hardware may look antiquated by today's standards, but its Intel ICH7R storage controller isn't all that different from what you get in the latest ICH10R today. Both conform to the second-generation "SATA II" 3Gbps Serial ATA specification, offering support for Native Command Queuing and 300MB/s host-to-disk transfer rates. The next-gen 6Gbps Serial ATA specification wasn't completed until this year, and it's not expected to make it to motherboards until the fall.

Even with only a Pentium 4 Extreme Edition onboard, this test system still has plenty of horsepower for the storage-intensive tests we use to probe hard drives for weakness. However, we should note that because Windows XP was optimized for mechanical storage, it's not an ideal OS for some of the solid-state drives. Our goal here isn't to look at the fine details of each drive's performance, but to observe overall trends that should be unaffected by oddball outliers. Besides, we've already addressed SSD performance in Windows Vista.

Oh, and rather than testing SSDs in factory-fresh form, we first put them into a simulated used state devoid of empty flash pages. We think this better represents long-term SSD performance.

Speaking of oddballs, a few of the configs we've tested over the years are far removed from what we'd consider practical solutions for even high-end desktop use. Neither of the DRAM-based solid-state drives we've used—Gigabyte's i-RAM and ACard's ANS-9010—offer enough storage capacity for even just an OS and applications drive. Our four-way Intel X25-E Extreme RAID 0 array, running on an Adaptec RAID 5405 card rather than the ICH7R, also costs about as much as small car—a Tata Nano, but still. These outlandish configs may not be reasonable for desktop use, but they do give us an idea of what the exotic reaches of the storage spectrum have to offer.

Getting all this test data consolidated and graphed in a single Excel spreadsheet proved to be a major undertaking. And that was before I tried distill the data down to a reasonable number of readable graphs. With 70 results for nearly every test, readability goes out the window pretty quickly. In an attempt to make things easier to interpret, we've segmented drives into 3.5", 2.5", 10k-RPM, and SSD categories and color-coded the results accordingly.

Before we get started, I should also note that you won't find boot time, noise level, or power consumption results in this retrospective. Over the last few years, we've switched up our test methods for each slightly, so we can't compare all our results directly. You'll find that a couple of drive configurations are missing from the iPEAK results, as well. We didn't introduce iPEAK to the test suite until August of 2005. Oh, and the i-RAM doesn't appear in our game level load tests or in WorldBench because its 4GB capacity wasn't big enough to accommodate the necessary files.

One last time, here are the finer details of our test system.

Thanks to NCIX for getting us the Deskstar 7K1000 and SpinPoint F1.

Our test system was powered by an OCZ PowerStream power supply unit.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

• WorldBench 5.0
• Intel IOMeter v2004.07.30
• Xbit Labs File Copy Test v1.0 beta 13
• HD Tach v3.01
• Far Cry v1.3
• DOOM 3
• Intel iPEAK Storage Performance Toolkit 3.0

The test systems' Windows desktop was set at 1280x1024 in 32-bit color at an 85Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests.

All the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.