FC-Test - MP3

Website: FC-Test

Our FC-Test benchmark is split into three parts. First is a write test involving the creation of a file pattern similar to common files such as MP3s or large video files. Once created on the drive, we then copy the file pattern from the drive back to a different folder on the same drive, producing a combined read/write test. Finally we test the read speed of the drive by performing FC-Test's read test on the files copied - we've omitted this test because we're unable to obtain reliable results at the moment.

For our benchmarks, we're using both the MP3 pattern, consisting of two hundred and seventy small files totalling 0.99GB, and the ISO pattern, consisting of three large files totalling 1.6GB in size. We feel these represent the most common files people will be frequently copying to and from an drive, and can be interpreted as as close to a real world file transfer test as possible.



Using the SATA 6Gbps ports, the Asus board is clearly faster in create and copy tests over the Gigabyte, but the 6Gbps Seagate doesn't exactly draw out a lead over the 3Gbps Western Digital in all cases.



Using the P55 SATA 3Gbps port the Asus board combined with the Seagate drive takes a second hit here, but that's not replicated by the Western Digital which is notably faster. On the Gigabyte board the performance is consistently fast throughout and compared to the SATA 6Gbps performance above, there's really no much difference.