ASUS TUF Gaming A1 External Drive Enclosure

To test the real-life performance of a drive we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of drive reading from & writing to a 256GB Samsung SSD850 PRO.

We use the following folder/file types:

• 100GB data file.
• 60GB iso image.
• 60GB Steam folder – 29,521 files.
• 50GB File folder – 28,523 files.
• 12GB Movie folder – 24 files (mix of Blu-ray and 4K files).
• 10GB Photo folder – 621 files (mix of .png, raw and .jpeg images).
• 10GB Audio folder – 1,483 files (mix of mp3 and .flac files).
• 5GB (1.5bn pixel) photo.
• BluRay movie.

Overall the TUF Gaming A1 with a Kingston KC3000 drive installed handled our real-life file transfers without any real problems. Transferring data from the drive to a SATA drive, the fastest write transfer was the BluRay Movie (594MB/s) while the fastest read performance came from the 4K Movie Clips folder transfer at 546MB/s.

To get a measure of how much faster PCIe NVMe drives are than standard SATA SSD's we use the same files but transfer to and from a 2TB Kioxia Exceria Plus drive:

Swapping out the SATA drive for an NVMe drive, as you might expect the transfer speeds rocketed up, particularly read performance which became much more consistent. The fastest read bandwidth of 1,013MB/s occurred in five of the transfers; 12GB Movie Folder, 5GB image, 4K & 8K movie folders and the BluRay transfer. The fastest write performance, 960MB/s came with the 60GB iso image transfer.

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