HD Tune Pro 4.50:
Next, I ran a series of tests using HD Tune Pro. This hard disk utility measures a drive's performance by testing its sequential read and write speeds as well as its access time, burst rate and CPU usage. For this review, I'm also going to use it to benchmark the PX-128M2S's random read and write speeds, random access times and the number of operations per second.
 HD Tune Read Benchmark (SATA 6Gb/s) |
 HD Tune Read Benchmark (SATA 3Gb/s) |
 HD Tune Write Benchmark (SATA 6Gb/s) |
 HD Tune Write Benchmark (SATA 3Gb/s) |
The PX-128M2S performed fairly well when connected to the HighPoint Rocket 620 SATA 6Gb/s controller card. The drive had average read and write speeds of 288.9 MB/s and 167.7 MB/s, respectively, and a burst rate of 280 MB/s.
 HD Tune Random Access Read (SATA 6Gb/s) |
 HD Tune Random Access Read (SATA 3Gb/s) |
 HD Tune Random Access Write (SATA 6Gb/s) |
 HD Tune Random Access Write (SATA 3Gb/s) |
As you'd expect, the PX-128M2S performed better when using SATA 6Gb/s. In our tests, the drive achieved 11616 IOPS and an average speed of 45.376 MB/s when writing 4K blocks. Unfortunately, the PX-128M2S did not perform nearly as well when reading. Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that the drive achieved only 3643 IOPS and an average speed of 14.234 MB/s.
Iometer:
Lastly, I ran a series of tests using Iometer. This tool can be configured to benchmark a number of things. In this case, I used it to measure the PX-128M2S's read and write speeds and the number of operations per second. These tests were run using blocks ranging from 512B to 2MB in size and a queue depth of 3.
The PX-128M2S's performance was very similar to what we saw in our other tests. With a 2MB block, the drive reached sequential read and write speeds of 384.10 MB/s and 229.47 MB/s, respectively.
When doing random reads, the PX-128M2S was able to reach speeds as high as 383.85 MB/s. However, its random write speeds dropped down to about 126 MB/s.
According to Plextor, the PX-128M2S is capable 15,000 IOPS when reading and 9,000 IOPS when writing 4K blocks. In our tests, the drive reached 12,381 IOPS when doing a random read and 10,213 IOPS when doing a random write.
