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FLASH MEDIA TEST PROTOCOL
In order to test the rated speeds of the card we choose to use a few popular synthetic benchmarks which include ATTO, CrystalDiskMark, and Anvil Storage Utilities Professional. Not only are we going to use these benchmarks, we are going to run a comparison against other cards I have in my bag and test in a real world use scenario. This should give us enough to confirm the rated specs and give us a more in-depth view on how it performs.
To connect the SDXC card to our computer we have the Kingston MobileLite G3 USB 3.0 card reader. It is a compact and simple plug-and-play card reader that allows for USB 3.0 transfer speeds for any SD / SDHC / SDXC and microSD / SDHC / SDXC cards. It is a pretty good buy especially at only around $10 and will allow us to test the Kingston Ultimate at up to its max rated speeds.
ATTO DISK BENCHMARK VER. 2.47
ATTO Disk Benchmark is a relatively easy-to-use benchmark tool. ATTO Disk Benchmark relies on testing different file sizes with highly compressible data. Although this is not the best representation of media files which are, for the most part, highly incompressible, it is a good start and is still the main mechanism most manufacturers use to determine their product specifications. In our testing, we have left the benchmark settings to default.
Initial results from ATTO show write speeds reaching 46MB/s and read speeds maxing around 83MB/s. While the write speed seems perfect, the read speed is a slight bit lower than advertised. This could be due to the data type, the test system USB port, the card is just under performing…or a combination of these. However, it is still close enough to where I wouldn’t take off anything for it.
CRYSTALDISKMARK BENCHMARK VER. 3.0.3
Crystal Disk Mark is visually straightforward and is used for measuring the speeds at which your storage device reads and writes with random, mostly incompressible, data. Random data is more consistent with everyday use of a computer, such as transferring videos, pictures and music. Thus, this benchmark will be a better representation of speeds to expect on a video or stills camera over ATTO.
Crystal Disk Mark reveals marginally better results of 86MB/s read and 47MB/s write. Typically the sequential speed is all we should be concerned about when it comes to testing SD cards. SD cards are meant to mainly transfer large media files and not smaller random data which the other tests (512k, 4k, 4k QB32) show below it.
ANVIL’S STORAGE UTILITIES PROFESSIONAL 1.1.0
Anvil’s Storage Utilities is the best software program available for benchmarking flash media. Not only does it give an accurate look at transfer speeds and throughput, but also, it goes even further by identifying file sizes, disk access times, as well as system and device identification. It even has many extra features such as endurance torture testing and a TRIM button feature to manually trigger TRIM on supported devices.
Finally, Anvil’s Storage Utilities shows us 81MB/s read and 43MB/s write speeds. Again the read is still lower than the rated 90MB/s, but still fairly good as this test is using fully compressed data for its testing.
Now, let’s move on to the real world testing and final thoughts.