iPEAK multitasking
We've developed a series of disk-intensive multitasking tests to highlight the impact of seek times and command queuing on hard drive performance. You can get the low-down on these iPEAK-based tests here. The mean service time of each drive is reported in milliseconds, with lower values representing better performance.

Our iPEAK workloads were recorded using a 40GB partition, so they're a little big for the 32GB X25-E. The app had no problems running, but it warned us that I/O requests that referenced areas beyond the drive's 32GB capacity would be wrapped around to the beginning of the drive. Since there should be no performance difference between the beginning and end of an SSD, the results should be valid.

The X25-E continues to make short work of the competition, slicing through our first wave of multi-tasking workloads with apparent ease. Only the X25-M comes close, and even then, only with the one workload that doesn't stress write performance.

Our second batch of multitasking workloads proves just as fertile ground for the X25-E, which again mops the floor with its rivals. The X25-M comes close to matching the Extreme's performance with some workloads, but it's well behind with those that include a file copy operation as the secondary task.