I was surprised today after installing a Kingston V+200 SSD that the Vista disk benchmark only improved from 5.2 with the spindle disk to 5.9 with the SSD.
Called Kingston support and they referred me to this tool (registration required, free download):
www.attotech.com/products/product.php?sku=Disk_Benchmark
At larger file sizes, the Kingston SSD in fact performed about four times faster than the spindle disk (200 MB/sec vs. 50MB/sec).
Makes me wonder whether the Vista benchmark isn’t based on smaller file sizes (4K, 8K), where spindle and SSD are much closer in performance.
By the way, this is a SATA 3 drive in a SATA 2 system. Kingston tells me ~ 280 MB/sec is the theoretical max under SATA 2. So when it showed 200-250 MB/sec (read and write), that’s probably the bus maxing out, not the drive.