AS-SSD
AS-SSD is designed to quickly test the performance of your drives. Currently, the program allows to measure sequential and small 4K read/write speeds as well as 4K file speed at a queue depth of 6. While its primary goal is to accurately test Solid State Drives, it does equally well on all storage mediums it just takes longer to run each test as each test reads or writes 1GB of data.
As you can see the read performance of the Lexar Portable SSD is very, very good. Sadly the all-important, for this model and its niche, write performance is not as stellar. Instead it simply is best described as merely good.
Crystal DiskMark
Crystal DiskMark is designed to quickly test the performance of your hard drives. Currently, the program allows to measure sequential and random read/write speeds; and allows you to set the number of tests iterations to run. We left the number of tests at 5 and size at 100MB.
Once again the Lexar Portable SSD posts very good read performance, but write performance that will bottleneck transfers even when dealing with even SD cards. The only time this will not happen is when CompactFlash cards are used. This model may need an upgrade in order to stay relevant.
Real World Performance
No matter how good a synthetic benchmark is, it cannot really tell you how your hard drive will perform in “real world” situations. To this end we will be running timed data transfers to give you a general idea of how its performance relates to real life use. To help replicate worse case scenarios we will transfer a 30.00GB contiguous file, then a folder containing 1200 subfolders with a total 36,000 files varying in length from 200mb to 100kb (15.00 GB total).
Testing will include transfer to and transferring from the devices, using MS RichCopy and logging the performance of the drive. Here is what we found.
As with all the synthetic performance results the Portable SSD has very good read performance but only middle of the road write performance. This will handicap the overall appeal to this model, but this level of performance is still pretty darn decent – and will be a great upgrade from HDD based external storage solutions most professionals typically rely upon.
