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FLASH MEDIA TEST PROTOCOL
If you have been an avid reader of Technology X and The SSD Review, you will be very familiar with our test protocol with respect to solid state drives. Solid state drives and secure digital cards both rely on flash memory for their storage and that flash memory provides us with a great deal of performance. Secure digital cards differ from SSDs, however, as their ‘sweet spot’ in transfer speeds is with large file reads and writes and not with low 4K data transfer that is needed for system operations and software. An SD card would never be considered for use as a bootable Windows or Mac device, unlike the SSD.
Today, we will test in both Windows and Mac and will be relying on our main Test Bench for Windows 7 testing, as well as our 2013 MBA to benchmark in OSX. AS much as one might think that performance is performance, regardless of the OS, you might be surprised.
ATTO Disk Benchmark relies on testing different file sizes with highly compressible data. Although this is not the best representation of media files which are, for the most part, highly incompressible, it is a good start and is still the main mechanism most manufacturers use to determine their product specifications.
Performance results of 95MB/s read and 48MB/s write were a bit surprising, considering listed specifications only reached 60MB/s read and 35MB/s write.
CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER. 3.0 X64
Crystal Disk Benchmark measures read and write transfer performance through the transfer of random, or highly incompressible data. This is very representative of the type of media we will see most on the Kingston Ultimate.
Once again, we are seeing incredible results that match ATTO dead on. These speeds are incredible, however, the 512K write speed was very low in comparison to that of the Lexar Professional 600x we tested a short time ago which had a 512K write speed of 27MB/s. Keep in mind that the Lexar test sample was about 8 times more expensive than the Kingston Ultimate.
ANVIL STORAGE UTILITIES PROFESSIONAL (BETA)
Anvil Storage Utilities is the best software program available for benchmarking flash media. Not only does it give an accurate look at transfer speeds and throughput, but also, it goes even further by identifying file sizes, disk access times, as well as system and device identification.
