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ATTO Disk Benchmark is perhaps one of the oldest benchmarks going and is definitely the main staple for manufacturer performance specifications. ATTO uses RAW or compressible data and, for our benchmarks, we use a set length of 256mb and test both the read and write performance of various transfer sizes ranging from 0.5 to 8192kb. Manufacturers prefer this method of testing as it deals with raw (compressible) data rather than random (includes incompressible data) which, although more realistic, results in lower performance results.
Performance of 252MB/s read and 162MB/s write doesn’t quite reach SATA 3 levels but it does improve upon the result that we saw at ceBIT. We would be willing to bet that testing of the 128 or 256GB capacities would result in SATA 3 performance. No matter how you look at it though, these are amazing speeds for a flash drive.
CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER. 3.0 X64
Crystal Disk Benchmark is used to measure read and write performance through sampling of highly compressible data (oFill/1Fill), or random data which is, for the most part, incompressible.
The one thing we watched for with the Crystal DiskMark test was the low 4k random write performance which has traditionally been very low for JMicron hardware. A high transfer speed of 52MB/s was excellent to see.
ANVIL STORAGE UTILITIES PROFESSIONAL (BETA)
You may not see this for long (and its definitely not common) but you get a freebee simply for reading! Over the last little while, we have been assisting with beta testing new benchmark software called Anvil Storage Utilities which is an absolutely amazing SSD benchmarking utility. Not only does it have a preset SSD benchmark, but also, it has included such things as endurance testing and threaded I/O read, write and mixed tests, all of which are very simple to understand and utilize in our benchmark testing.
ssd controller makers should start making native usb 3.0 controllers, possibly with single die for all products (just like sandforce does it for consumer and enterprise chips), that way prices would be lower, no need for bridge chips and smaller size (due to missing bridge chip).
no that will cost more cause then you got to do the process together and at the same time. The yield for that will be really really low consider you are packing a lot of things together.
That’s a pretty interesting idea. Given that the physical protocol implementation is insignificantly small compared to the rest of a modern SSD controller, this shouldn’t increase manufacturing cost by much.
Then again – the market for USB SSDs is insignificantly small right now, so there’s really not much point adding to manufacturing costs just for that – even if the cost difference would be just a few cents per unit.
How about testing the speeds through a normal USB 2.0 interface ? I am interested to see if the random 4K read/write speeds are maintained through the older USB 2.0 and not only through USB 3.0. Since this does not support TRIM ( SMART is also not supported ? ) then what drive does support TRIM and SMART through USB interface ? Does the Kingston Datatraveler or the RC8 support it ? How about the upcoming Mushkin Ventura 2281 device ? What about doing a size comparison next to a dummy credit card so we can estimate size. Otherwise, great review sir !
Give us a few days and watch for the update. Tx ahead.
Dunno about this drive, but both the DataTraveler Workspace and the RC8 support SMART, just like any other SandForce based drive. I wouldn’t worry about TRIM, as it is essentially useless in real-life scenarios (and can even REDUCE your performance due to one fucked up quirk of the SATA protocol).
If you want to visualise size, I suggest you look at the USB connector. These are as standard-sized as it gets ;-).