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Testing products like high-speed USB drives is a simple enough process.
We use a combination or ATTO and CrystalDiskMark.
For our performance testing, we used a workstation built on the ASUS Rampage IV Gene mainboard with a XEON E5-2660 processor and 16GB of memory. As you will read, we tried by the top mounted and ‘direct to mainboard' USB3 ports.
Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSDs. We are using V3.01 x64 to test throughput.
Results were very similar for the default settings and the 0X00 fill option – similar performance with compressible and incompressible data streams.
This drive is significantly faster than a USB 2.0 device, but falls 70MB/sec short on the read speed claimed on the packaging and just over 50MB/sec short on writes.
We then put the drive through a full set of ATTO tests.
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.
With a peak read that falls just under 193MB/sec and a write speed of just under 190MB/sec, we can see that ATTO rates the drive faster than CrystalDiskMark.
That said, we're still short of the claimed speeds – around 20-25% slower than the official speeds quoted on the packaging.
UPDATE: Several readers contacted KitGuru to ask if we had made ‘every effort' to secure the best performance figures possible. Specifically, if we had used ASUS' famous USB 3.0 Boost technology. The answer is yes and we apologise for not mentioning this earlier. Here's a segment of a screen grab with CrystalDiskMark shown on top of the appropriate line from Task Manager. In multiple tests, the numbers only vary by a megabyte/sec or so.
