This is not a new update, but I only found out about it recently.
A new BIOS update called 223 and something else. It seems that the “something else” part seems to improve the eMMC storage performance, but it needs BIOS 223 to work.
This is what I saw on the Asus Live Update application.
I wanted to see if it really improved the eMMC storage performance. So I ran Crystal Disk Mark before installing the updates. These are the scores that I got.
Couple of weeks back I was ranting about how slow the eMMC storage on these Windows 8 tablets and that was the main cause of lag in them. You really need to have a proper SSD based storage on these tablets to really harness the power of the OS.
A week ago I bought my new Tablet and unfortunately it still came with eMMC storage. But I was hoping that it would be faster than the storage in the previous generation tablets. Today I ran Crystal Disk Mark to confirm it. Here are the results.
Asus Transformer Book T100
Recently I purchased a Toshiba DT01ACA300 3TB drive to replace my old RAID-0 volume. Yes, you read it right. I replaced a high performance storage solution with a single drive solution. I did it for couple of things.
1. More capacity. I had 2TB, now I have 3TB.
2. Safety of data. Two drives in RAID-0 doubles the chances of something going wrong. Well, that’s if you look purely at the hardware faults. You can even corrupt the RAID volume.
3. Less power consumption. Single drive is better than two drives.
Anyways, the old drives were top of the line couple of years ago and two of them RAID-0 still can do a wonderful job. Here’s some benchmarks of the empty RAID-0 volume.
CrystalDiskMark
HD Tune Pro 5
Compared to the Toshiba’s scores, these were scoring substantially higher. But weirdly, I am not really noticing the difference in performance.
BTW, if interested, here’s the single drive performance.
CrystalDiskMark
HD Tune Pro 5
I ordered the Toshiba DT01ACA300 3TB 1TB/platter drive from Dospara for JPY10,770 and I received it the next day as expected. Even though I was busy with helping out a friend with few things, I didn’t forget to run a couple of benchmarks on the drive before I went to bed. I also ordered the latest iteration of Western Digital Green drive as my backup drive from Sofmap, but as usual, they failed to deliver within the next day. I’ll have to benchmark it tonight.
I will post a comparison between all the 4 drives (5 setups including the RAID-0 setup) later. But for now, I will have to settle with just these.
BTW, just for the sake of comparison, the benchmarks were done on a SATA2 port of the Intel controller on my ASRock Z68 Extreme4 board. Eventually I will move it to a SATA3 port, but I doubt I will see a difference in performance. Tests were done on the empty drive in Windows 8 x64.
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.2 x64
HD Tune Pro 5
Forgot to mention one thing though. Even though this is a Toshiba drive, the OEM is Hitachi. The drive name shown in the HD Tune Pro screenshot is the OEM model number. There is one alarming thing about that model number. It ends with 640. That most likely means the platter density. Even though Toshiba says that the DT01ACAxxxx drives have a density of 1TB/platter, Hitachi doesn't make a 1TB/platter drive that is larger that 1TB. Weird stuff. Anyways, as per this article, the Toshiba is about 30MBps faster than a Hitachi.
Cheers
