Performance

Before diving into performance, I ran CrystalDiskInfo to take a look at what was inside of the drive. What I found was the SanDisk SD9SN8W1T00. This is an M.2 SATA based drive that they sell in capacities up to 2TB, sound familiar? Now using a normal drive inside of a portable drive isn’t unusual or a bad thing at all. Just about every portable drive does this with 3.5/2.5 hard drives as well. It is just nice to be able to know more information about the drive inside. Check out that data sheet linked.

cdi

So we know SanDisk said we should see up to 550 read speeds. Well in CrystalDiskMark we weren’t far off with 545.5 MB/s but its those write speeds that were important to me and 481.9 MB/s isn’t too bad. Being a SATA based drive that is the big limitation here but that is more than enough performance for most people. It is also much faster than the 510 from SanDisk that I tested last year and the WD My Passport SSD as well. Both of those were in the 300’s. Remember you will need a USB 3.1 connection to get the full bandwidth here, USB 3.0 will be capped in the low 300’s.

cdm

In Anvil’s Storage Benchmark things were a touch slower on the rear speeds and down in the mid 200’s for write speeds. Rear IOPS weren’t bad though but were way off on the write speeds. Rear IOPS were about double the 510 but I don’t know why it fell on its face so hard with the write IOPS.

anvil

I don’t know that I am a fan of the recently updated ATTO Disk Benchmark now, its IO results didn’t make sense. But the rear and write speeds here were really good, peaking at 499MB/s for writes and 533MB/s for reads.

atto

All of the other tests are great and all, but really the only test I was wondering about is our real world transfer tests. I ran three of them using three different file types/sizes. These are all situations that you would be using your portable drive to backup or transfer files. The first was copying a large file size with a movie file. Now, this is the fastest of the three and came in at 220MB/s, you can see where it peaked and stayed right there. The second picture was showing transferring large photo files, these are much smaller than movies but still big files so you can see the speed writing to the drive was just a little slower at 195MB/s. Last I packed a folder with nearly every review that I have ever written. These are small file size word documents and that slows things down significantly. The write speed was down to 4.04 MB/s here.

moviefiles

Movies - Write Speeds

picturefiles

Pictures - Write Speeds

wordfiles

Word Documents - Write Speeds

The other half of the real world testing is the same three tests only moving them from the Extreme Portable SSD back to the PC. This is looking at drive rear speeds. So the movies transfer back much faster at 421MB/s, still not up to the max speeds seen in the synthetic tests but not bad! The pictures aren’t far behind at 347 MB/s and as expected the small word document files were down at 6.22 MB/s.

moviefilesread

Movies - Read Speeds

picturefilesread

Pictures - Read Speeds

wordfilesread

Word Documents - Read Speeds

 

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