The Quick System Drive Benchmark is a shorter test with a smaller set of less demanding real-world traces. You can use this benchmark to test smaller system drives that are unable to run the Full System Drive benchmark. This benchmark is better suited for testing entry performance level and lower capacity drives in less demanding use scenarios.
The benchmark is designed to measure the performance of small system drives from traditional spinning drives (HDDs) at the low end and entry-level PCI Express SSDs at the high end.
The Quick System Drive Benchmark uses 6 traces, running 3 passes with each trace. It typically takes 20 minutes to run.
Traces used
| Result file label | Description |
| cps1 | Copying 339 JPEG files, 2.37 GB in total, in to the target drive (write test) |
| cps2 | Making a copy of the JPEG files (read-write test) |
| cps3 | Copying the JPEG files to another drive (read test) |
| exc | Using Microsoft Excel |
| ill | Using Adobe Illustrator |
| psl | Using Adobe Photoshop (light use) |
Scoring
Overall score
The PCMark 10 Quick System Drive Benchmarks produces an overall score, which is calculated from the bandwidth and average access time sub-scores.
PCMark 10 Storage score = geometric mean (bandwidth, 1 / average access time)
Sub-scores
The secondary metrics are Bandwidth and Average access time.
During a trace playback, the start and end time is measured for each I/O.
access_time_for_an_I/O = end time - start time
Specifically, filesystem target type can issue other types of I/O than read and write, for example, create file and close file. To be able to focus on actual data transfer performance:
average_access_time = arithmetic mean of only read and write access time
Busy time is a metric used to quantify the amount of time that the storage device is executing I/Os. It is defined as the sum of all times when at least one I/O was executing. Again, to be able to focus on data transfer performance, we define busy_time_for_read_and_write as the time when at least one read or write operation was executing. Using this and the number of bytes being transferred during the trace playback, we define:
bandwidth = bytes / busy_time_for_read_and_write