How powerful is the RAID of four groups of SSDs? Sony Z 1 19 hard disk measurement.

The evaluation of IT 168 should include all the most NB notebooks today, most of which are large-size notebooks with good configuration, mainly reflected in indicators such as graphics cards and appearance, but this year we saw such a product-Sony VAIO Z 1 19. In addition to Intel Core i7, GT335M discrete graphics card, 8GB memory and 1080p screen, this machine is also equipped with a rare RAID hard disk composed of four128GB SSDs on 13 inch computers, which completely solves the biggest performance bottleneck problem of notebooks at present and provides a better solution for some users with high data processing requirements. Let the RAID hard disk that can only be enjoyed by large workstation notebooks appear on the 13-inch notebook, so that the application of small-sized notebooks is wider. So what is the performance of such a powerful notebook hard disk? Now we will test the performance of this hard disk from many angles.

Generally, the SSD RAID hard disks we see all need several hard disks to be connected through a flat cable. In order to reduce the space occupied by hard disk, Sony Z 1 19 RAID hard disk integrates control chip, cache and flash memory chip.

Panorama of Sony Z 1 19 SSD hard disk

The control chip of SSD hard disk adopts Samsung's scheme.

The cache chip and flash memory are Samsung's.

By disassembling the notebook, we can see that Sony Z 1 19 adopts Samsung's high-performance SSD RAID solution, which is smaller in weight and volume than the general 2.5-inch notebook hard disk, and achieves the purpose of improving performance without affecting the weight of the notebook through high integration.

Obviously, the application of RAID can actually be more extensive.

The BIOS customization interface provided by Sony Z 1 19 is extremely simple. You can display and hide the startup RAID setup interface through the BIOS. When it is set to display the RAID interface, press and hold CTRL+I to enter the local RAID setting interface after booting.

The RAID setting interface can be created, deleted and restored.

In this setting interface, you can create, delete, initialize and restore the hard disk RAID of your computer. From the interface, you can see that the machine consists of four Samsung solid-state drives, each with a capacity of 1 19.2GB. You can create hard disk RAID after selecting Create. The operation interface is relatively friendly and contains corresponding prompt information.

You can set it to RAID 0,10,5 according to your own needs.

You can choose several hard disks to set RAID according to your own needs and the capacity of a single disk in the RAID system, and you can set RAID 0, 10 or 5 at will. This has the advantage that it can be set according to different use requirements of users. If the user is not satisfied with the capacity of 128GB, and the speed requirement is not too high, he can choose a RAID system with a larger hard disk capacity, or even simply achieve the storage effect without setting it. However, after changing the storage mode of the hard disk, the hard disk is initialized and the system needs to be reinstalled.

Intel Rapid Storage Technology Setup Interface

However, these settings are not enough. When installing the system, you need to load the Intel RAID driver. After successful installation, the system can better identify. When entering the system, we can see the software supporting Intel Rapid Storage Technology, in which we can also configure hard disk RAID accordingly.

This software provides the creation and management of RAID system.

Disable open write cache.

The Intel Rapid Storage technology software in the system can be better managed and configured intuitively. The newer the software version, the better the performance of the hard disk. This time, we loaded version 9.6.

Sony Z 1 19 Hard Disk Professional Software Testing

For such a tough hard disk collocation, we always expect its performance. Although the data is not intuitive, only professional software can comprehensively examine the performance of the hard disk, so we still use several professional hard disk testing software to test it first.

HD Tune Pro test

Through the test of HD Tune Pro, it can be seen that the speed of hard disk reaches more than 500MB per second, and the storage time is only 0.2 milliseconds, which is obviously improved compared with the speed of ordinary hard disk.

Benchmark test

Then store the test.

File benchmark test

HD speed test

HD Tach is the underlying hardware benchmark software specially designed for random access read-write storage devices, such as hard disk, mobile hard disk, flash memory device, RAID array, etc. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low-level Windows interfaces to bypass unnecessary software layer interference as much as possible and realize the test close to the physical performance of the device.

The average speed reaches 577MB per second, and the burst speed reaches 1850MB per second.

ATTO disk benchmark test

ATTO is a more direct type of disk benchmark test, which tests the original transfer rate of read and write operations, and then shows the test results to users with easy-to-understand charts. We choose the transmission size from 0.5KB to 8 192KB for testing.

Sony Z 1 19 hard disk test results

Test results of ordinary single SSD hard disk

Compared with an ordinary SSD data, it is found that the gap between reading and writing of Z 1 19 has increased by three times, and the reading and writing speed has increased exponentially between 4k and 64k transmission sizes. When the transmission size is greater than 64k, the reading and writing speed basically remains at about 500MB/s, with little change.

West soft Sandra test

In our SiSoft SANDRA test, we used the physical disk test suite, and we didn't need to format the disk to perform the test. Detailed reading and writing performance indicators are shown in the figure below.

By comparison, we can find that the hard disk data of Sony Z 1 19 is far superior to other hard disks, and its performance index is very comprehensive.

IOMeter test

By testing IOMeter, we can know the performance of testing IO under RAID formation.

Practical application test of Sony Z 1 19 hard disk

After such a powerful hard disk has been tested by professional software, we have been able to have a preliminary understanding of its performance, but good things are used. What is its practical application performance? Let's take a look at it with the usual boot, large-capacity file copying and batch processing.

There are many startup items in the test.

In order to distinguish the test data more easily, we added Photoshop CS4, Acrobat, Office 20 10, browser, chat software and antivirus software, and compared them with an ordinary SSD.

At the same time, a Blu-ray DVD with a capacity of 19GB was tested for large-capacity file transfer, and 10 pictures with a size of 5MB were tested for file processing, thus making a comprehensive comparative analysis of practical applications.

Comparison of Time Loss Data of Three Tests

Sony Z 1 19 Copy Time Test for Large Capacity Files

Sony Z 1 19 Completion Time

Single disk SSD completion time

HDD hard disk completion time

By comparison, it is found that the advantages of RAID are more obvious when transferring large-capacity files, and the file processing and startup time is doubled. Although this time is only calculated in seconds, this promotion can still bring a very obvious improvement to the work for users who usually have a large throughput in processing file data. For the current performance bottleneck of notebook hard disk, we often see that more and more notebooks use SSD hard disk to improve performance, and this time Sony implanted SSD RAID system into small notebooks, which undoubtedly made the performance of portable notebooks surpass and improve. I believe that under such a drive, the performance of small-sized notebooks will once again be qualitatively improved.