Benchmarking

Amongst the midst of marketing and sales presentations and printed benchmark comparisons, we asked Mtron’s representatives to convince us of the performance merits of Solid State drives and to prove their claims.

NitroWare.net was able to witness two equally configured Toshiba M600 notebooks (with expect to the storage solution) run through their paces on the popular ‘Atto32’ synthetic benchmark. One unit had an Mtron MOBI 3000 series 2.5” 32GB SSD and the other the OEM supplied 2.5” 160GB HDD.

At first glance, Atto’s results can be misleading since it dynamically scales axis of its charts but we witnessed the SSD equipped laptop won hands down, with a final score of 80.4MB/s for the SSD versus 44.5MB/s for the HDD

We provided our readers with partial progress pictures as proof the benchmark was live and not a screenshot or simulated benchmark. Mtron’s representative loaded atto32 from the program icon individually on the laptops and ran the benchmark without assistance.

This is not the end of the story however.

Mtron’s demo systems also contained the popular ‘hdtune’ benchmark. We tried to get MTron’s representatives to run this benchmark for us so that there is no reliance on a single benchmark that a vendor may have optimised towards but at the last second MTron changed their mind and would not run this benchmark for us as we were taking photos for publication.We were also unable to view how quickly the operating system on these demo machines (Windows Vista) could start-up or shutdown.

Mtrons sales representatives stated they were not really authorised to demonstrate more than they had permission for since they were sales and not marketing/press representatives. In addition, the external display was disconnected while the benchmark was in process.

According to Mtron’s own marketing materials, the ‘HDtune’ benchmark had been used by the company and the results published in various product documents, hence the presence of the benchmark on their demonstration computers but we were not aware of this aspect at the time of our meeting.

For a company who is trying to promote how fast their products are (and this is one of their main sell points) they sure are controlled and cagey as to how the performance aspect of their product is demonstrated in public than on paper.

While this is fine especially within the aspect of a trade show where the focus is on establishing new business relationships and contacts, smaller/niche firms or branch offices have a habit of ignoring the marketing or publicity aspects of any demonstration opportunities especially ones that are aboard from a firm’s home base.

Any time a firm demonstrates or promotes its products in the public eye wether it’s a trade show, channel expo or such events these are marketing and publicity opportunities; smaller or niche firms should especially back up these activities with marketing or relations specialists rather than just sent a overseas sales team to the event who are unable to directly assist with all enquiries. Commercial product buyers are not the only type of users who visit these events.Mtron is not the only firm who is following this trend but we mention this for completeness.

If you claim your product is ‘the fastest’ in all applications and some independent evaluations have also proven these claims then you have nothing to hide then convince the press AND your target users beyond all reasonable doubt of the advantages of a technology you have adopted or your product.