PCMark Vantage HDD Tests

PCMark Vantage is an objective hardware performance benchmark tool for PCs running 32- and 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows 7. PCMark Vantage is well suited for benchmarking any type of Microsoft Windows 7 PC: from multimedia home entertainment systems and laptops, to dedicated workstations and high-end gaming rigs. Benchmark Reviews has decided to use the HDD Test Suite to demonstrate simulated real-world storage drive performance in this article.

PCMark Vantage runs eight different storage benchmarks, each with a specific purpose. Once testing is complete, results are given a PCMark score while and detailed results indicate actual transaction speeds. Since it simulates real-world consumer workloads, Vantage gives much more weight to read speeds, and fast iOPS are not as important as they would be in a server or other business environment. With an overall score of 99679 (Toshiba NVMe driver), the RD400 showed good performance, but as you can see from the chart below, the use of the Windows NVMe driver increases the overall score by over 60%.

In this benchmark, the use of the Windows drivers returns a dramatically higher overall score– by just over 60%– than the native driver. Let’s look at the individual test scores:

512GB OCZ RD400 PCIe SSD PCMark Vantage Results (Windows driver)

512GB OCZ RD400 PCIe SSD PCMark Vantage Results (Toshiba driver)

 As you can see, in the PCMark Vantage benchmark, the Toshiba driver returns lower scores in every single test, and the difference is dramatic in some tests– for example, importing pictures is over three times faster using the Windows driver.

In the next section, I share my review conclusion and final product rating.