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Benchmark - PCMARK 7
As defined by its developer Futuremark, PCMARK 7's storage test
- Windows Defender workload uses a recording trace of a Quick scan of the system. Raw CPU performance is the determinant here as there is no user activity
- Importing pictures workload uses a trace of importing a collection of images in Windows Live Photo Gallery from a USB stick. Idle time consists of waiting for the external storage device and for the CPU to process the pictures. Idle time can be reduced with faster storage
- Video editing - A home video project was prepared with Windows Live Movie Maker using imported 1080i MPEG-2 videos.. Video Editing is CPU bound not storage therefore any idle storage time is taken by CPU processing but newer methods also leverage GPU processing
- Windows Media Center focuses on recording and playing video. Using a dual DVB-T tuner, A movie was recorded and after the recording had finished, two simultaneous recordings were started and playback of the first movie was started.. Activity is focused on responsiveness of reading and writing videos from storage
- Adding music - This workload uses a trace of adding music to media library. An external HDD with 68GB of music is imported into a Windows Media Player library. Idle time is based on the type of external storage used
- Starting applications - This workload uses a trace of starting up home and office productivity applications. PCMark 7 specification 1.0 document was copied to Desktop and opened, followed by opening Internet Explorer. . Minimal idle time was observed in the original test
- Gaming - This workload uses a trace of starting up World of Warcraft.World of Warcraft was installed. A new character was created in the game. The game was closed and started again. This is some what similar to starting applications, with the exception that some time is spent also on network traffic. Network speeds cannot be dramatically improved so neither can idle times
PCMARK 7's storage scores are normalized against a now very old but for the time high end system: Intel i7-965, 500GB 7200.12 Seagate HDD and a Windows 7 software load with productivity and gaming applications. Any of the SSDs featured will obviously give an outstanding result in this test, CPU dependant of course. However the Intel 520 drive is around the same age.
80GB Windows 10 disk image
