ADATA DashDrive Elite SE720 128GB External SSD Review

SYSTEM COMPONENTS

A primary focus at Technology X is to relate our testing situations and equipment to that of the consumer. All of the components we use for testing and evaluation can be easily purchased at a relatively affordable price. The links provided below can assist in pricing, as well as availability for those of you who may find interest in our equipment.

BENCHMARK SOFTWARE

For analytical purposes, Technology X uses benchmark software that is easily accessible for the consumer. Furthermore, our equipment is only “fine tuned” using the SSD Optimization Guide, meaning that CPU clock speeds have not been adjusted.

ADATA has noted the DashDrive as being capable of read and write speeds of up to 300MB/s and 400MB/s respectfully. Let’s see how the DashDrive stands up to our testing protocols!

CRYSTAL DISK INFO VER. 5.5.0

Crystal Disk Info is a great tool for displaying the characteristics and health of storage devices. It displays everything from temperatures, to the number of hours the device has been powered, and even to the extent of informing you of the firmware of the device.

ATTO DISK BENCHMARK VER. 2.47

ATTO Disk Benchmark is a relatively easy-to-use benchmark tool, which happens to be the benchmark of choice for many manufacturers. ATTO uses compressible data rather than random data, as this results in higher performance and thus, higher benchmark scores. In our testing, we have selected the transfer size to range from 0.5KB to 8192KB, and have set the total length of the test to be 256MB.

The DashDrive exceeds write expectations with speeds up to 355 MB/s. Surprisingly enough, the read speeds were coming in lower than what was previously noted, reaching only as high as 282 MB/s.

CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER. 3.0.3 x64

Crystal Disk Benchmark is visually straightforward, and is used for measuring the speeds at which your storage device reads and writes in both compressible (oFill/1Fill) and random, mostly incompressible, data. Random data is more consistent with everyday use of a computer, such as the transferring of videos, pictures and music.

We ran the benchmark twice, using oFill data first, and then proceeding to test with random data. The results for the DashDrive using compressible data (right) came back expected, and were very similar to the results seen with the ATTO. Meanwhile, the random data results (left) displayed write speeds of 192 MB/s.