System Overview & Testing Procedures
Once the drive is formatted you have 223GB of usable space.  Most SandForce-based drives that are 256GB are advertised as 240GB drives and only have 223GB of usable space once formatted.

Opening up CrystalDiskInfo we can see all of the information about the drive.  It supports S.M.A.R.T., APM, NCQ and most importantly TRIM.

For testing the drive we will be using the following benchmarking programs, we have provided links to each so you can run the benchmarks as well.

HDTune Pro (download)
ATTO Disk Benchmark (download)
CrystalDiskMark 64bit (download)
AS SSD Benchmark (download)
Anvil Storage Utility Professional (download)

We also made these optimization changes…
- No power saving options in the BIOS
- ACHI enabled in the BIOS
- Windows 7 User Account Control (UAC) is disabled
- Windows 7 power saving settings are disabled

So let’s get into testing!