Strontium Nitro 566X SDXC UHS-1 Card and Nitro 466X Micro SDHC UHS-1 Card Review

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 transferring videos, pictures and music.

For the Strontium Nitro 566X SDXC card we ran Crystal Disk Mark using only random data, the reasoning behind this is that random data testing will produce results that are more consistent with every day use of the SDXC card. The results, again, did not disappoint with read speeds of 94MB/s and write speeds of 64MB/s.

For the Strontium Nitro 466X Micro SDHC card we ran the benchmark twice, using oFill (compressible) data first, and then proceeding to test with random data. Micro SD cards today have a wide range of possible uses. What was once used for strictly creating additional media storage for your cellular phone, is now being used for storage of applications and programs (E.g., Android APKs).

The results for the compressible data test produced speeds much faster than the listed 70MB/s, which we were expecting as compressible data is more consistent with greater transfer speeds and performance.  For a more realistic comparison, let’s go one step further and see how the Strontium Nitro 466X Micro SDHC performs with incompressible data (I.e., pictures and videos).

The Strontium Nitro 466X Micro SDHC card produced read speeds of 85MB/s, a very impressive performance as it even succeeds it’s own expectations of 70MB/s. The only performance flaw visible with the Micro SD card is the write speeds of 21 MB/s, it would have been nice to see speeds that are a little quicker.

QUICKBENCH VER. 4.0

QuickBench is another benchmark tool used to measure the transfer speeds and performance of storage devices. QuickBench is a good tool for confirming the previously produced read and write speeds seen above.

As we can see below, QuickBench demonstrates read and write speeds that are more in line with the speeds noted by Strontium. We can also see here that the Strontium Nitro 566X SDXC card is formatted in exFAT, which is necessary format for SDXC.

Again we see below that the Strontium 466X Micro SDHC card produces scores that reflect the read and write speeds noted by Strontium. This is the added benefit of using multiple benchmarking software tools to evaluate individual storage drives, as it gives us a more in-depth perspective of the drives.