Intel Rapid Storage Technology Series 11 Performance Report Storage   Page 1

Reviewer: Jon Coulter Article Publish Date: 7/19/2012

 

 

 

 

Most of the SSD’s we’ve reviewed have been reviewed with our test rig running on INTEL 10.6.0.1002 IRST storage drivers. Since the site’s been down for a few days I decided to refresh the test rig by doing a clean install of Windows 7 and updating to INTEL 11.0.0.1032 IRST storage drivers. Right away I noticed an increase in performance. I was able to break the 90,000 Vantage barrier with 2 drives, and I noticed a huge increase in 4k write performance as well. Since 4K write performance is such an important metric to a drives overall performance, I thought we should do a quick 4K comparison with the 4K write performance king the OCZ Technologies Vertex 4 to highlight the performance increases 11 series IRST drivers are ushering in. This will be just a brief overview with a few benchmarks before and after installation of 11.0.0.1032 IRST drivers to demonstrate the performance evolution of INTEL’s IRST driver.

 

 

 

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Two things are demonstrated by these benchmarks. 1) INTEL is giving us real performance increases with 11 Series drivers. 2) OCZ Technologies Vertex 4 is a performance MONSTER when it comes to 4K writes.

Something to keep in mind…if you are running Windows 7 and you install an INTEL 11 series driver make sure it does not create a SCSI disk. A SCSI disk does not have functioning TRIM running on Windows 7. I have tested two 11 series IRST drivers, 11.0.0.1032 and 11.5. IRST driver 11.5 creates a SCSI disk, IRST driver 11.0.0.1032 does not create a SCSI disk.

We were very impressed by the performance boost we got by switching storage drivers and decided to pass this information to you our readers.

Click (here) to download the 11.0.0.1032 driver we used.