Unlike other synthetic storage tests, this focus on real-world activities enables PCMark 10 to show meaningful differences between the latest, high-performance storage technologies. The tests also measure and report the bandwidth and average access time performance for the drive.Įach test uses traces recorded while performing real-world tasks such as booting Windows 10, starting applications such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, working with applications such as Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint, and copying several large files and many small files. Comparing devices is as simple as comparing scores. PCMark 10 Storage Benchmarks produce an overall score as a measure of drive performance. You can find more details in the PCMark 10 Technical Guide.įull System Drive Benchmark result screen screenshot In-depth reporting shows how the performance of the drive varies under different conditions.

The Drive Performance Consistency Test is a long-running and extremely demanding test with a heavy, continuous load for expert users. You can also use this test with NAS drives, USB sticks, memory cards, and other external storage devices. The Data Drive Benchmark is designed to test drives that are used for storing files rather than applications. You can use this benchmark to test smaller system drives that are unable to run the Full System Drive benchmark. The Quick System Drive Benchmark is a shorter test with a smaller set of less demanding real-world traces. The Full System Drive Benchmark uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and common tasks to fully test the performance of the fastest modern drives. PCMark 10 introduces a set of four storage benchmarks that use relevant real-world traces from popular applications and common tasks to fully test the performance of the latest modern drives. And results from synthetic benchmarks can be hard to relate to real-world performance.

Unfortunately, many of the tools for measuring storage performance were developed when HDDs were the most common type of drive. PC users now have a wide range of options from standard SATA SSDs and hybrid drives to the latest PCIe 4.0 NVMe storage devices and new technologies like Intel’s Optane. PC storage has advanced in exciting new directions in recent years.

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