HD Tune — Transfer rates
We'll begin with HD Tune, which offers a series of targeted tests that will give some insight into each drive's raw potential. From there, we'll proceed to more real-world measures of drive performance.

I've removed the mechanical drives from all of our line graphs to make them a little easier read. Plus, Excel really doesn't have enough colors. If you'd like to see how the transfer-rate profiles of our mechanical hard drives compare, check out this page of our Caviar Green 3TB review.

Samsung gets off to a good start as the 470 Series' sequential read rate eclipses 210MB/s. It's only a couple of MB/s behind our single-drive leaders, the RealSSD C300 and X25-M, which is pretty good company to keep.

Before we move onto writes, scroll up and check out the line graph for a second. Note how the 470 Series maintains a consistent transfer rate across the extent of its capacity, an attribute not shared by every SSD we've tested.

You can see dramatic oscillations in the Force F120's sequential write rate, but again, the 470 Series maintains a pretty even keep from start to finish. Even though the 470 Series' write speed dips every so often, it never drops below 204MB/s, producing an overall average that puts the Samsung drive just behind a trio of SandForce-based SSDs. Those 100GB SandForce drives have much lower minimum write speeds only because they get off to a slow start in this particular test. That excuse doesn't apply to the 120GB Force F120, though.

Next up: some burst-rate tests that should test the cache speed of each drive. We've omitted the X25-V RAID array from the following results because it uses a slice of system memory as a drive cache.

Dual cache chips or not, the 470 Series doesn't fare well in HD Tune's burst rate tests. The Samsung SSD falls to the back of the pack, and its transfer rates in this test are even lower than the minimum read and write speeds we observed in the sequential throughput tests. Given those results, I wouldn't worry too much about these ones—at least not yet.