Performance
With the Savage being a USB 3.1 drive its clear that performance was going to be the most important aspect. So to put that to the test I ran it through a couple of the SSD benchmarks that we use. Specifically, I ran the Savage through a full CrystalDiskMark benchmark to test out its sequential performance and then a full Anvil’s Storage Utilities SSD Benchmark to check out IOPS and see the response times as well. Because we don’t test to many USB 3 flash drives I did bust out the older Kingston DataTraveler HyperX and tested it as well for comparison.
Running through these tests I found out a few things really quickly. First the new Savage drive is crazy fast, with read speeds of 322+ and 287+ on the write speeds it is faster than some of the SSDs that I use. The older drive wasn’t bad as well but was much slower on the write speeds. It did however handle the high queue depth better. What I also found out doing this test is that both drive, but especially the Savage have performance that depends on how warm the drive is. This isn’t a huge shock, we have seen it on laptops and on just about every phone. Basically when doing my testing (I retest a lot just to confirm my numbers), if I didn’t wait a little in between tests the numbers would suffer. Sometimes this is due to a cache but in this case it would only happen for me when the drives got especially warm.
HyperX Savage
Kingston DataTraveler HyperX
So with that in mind how did the drives perform in the more in depth Anvil benchmark? Well when looking at the sequential numbers the Savage pulled ahead once again both on the read and write benchmarks. The older HyperX drive performed a little better in the high queue depth situations once again and Anvil’s favors that so it showed in the overall numbers.
HyperX Savage
Kingston DataTraveler HyperX
So what do they all mean? Well first off we found out that even the older HyperX drive is still a fast drive. In order to see the optimum performance from the Savage avoiding high queue depth situations where you are doing more than one thing at a time on the drive will avoid those slowdowns. With a considerably faster write speed I think the Savage is still going to give you the best experience. Most people are taking things off and putting things on their drives, not loading it once and just reading it over and over, so the write speed will show in everyday use.
