Testing external storage designed for use in cameras is not like testing solid state drives, or even compact storage devices like ‘thumb drives’. These devices have very unique standards and have been optimized for highly specialized roles. For this reason, we have chosen to a combination of synthetic and real world tests that will show the intended customer base what the real strengths and weaknesses of a product line are.
To this end we have chosen ATTO, AS-SSD, and Crystal DiskMark for our synthetic test suites. However, we have opted to no include any deep queue depth testing. Instead only the sequential, medium size, and single queue small file size tests are run. ATTO’s full range of file sizes will be included but this only so that consumers can see the performance curves a given storage device offers. Furthermore, we will be significantly discounting any results under the 8K mark in ATTO.
For real world we have opted for our usual real-world transfer test. This is a two-part test. The first consist of timing how long a single 30GB (30 Billion bytes) .rar file takes to copy to, and then from the devices. The second consists of timing how long it takes to copy to and then from 15GB (15 Billion bytes) worth of small files (from 100kb to 200MB) with a total 36,000 files in 1200 subfolders. For the card reader we have opted for Lexar’s WorkFlow USB 3.0 series. This series offers great performance, reasonable prices, and is specialized for a specific interface. IE each format has its own WorkFlow model that has been tuned for that particular storage type.
In between each test run the storage device is wiped and ensured to be in a virgin state via manual TRIM’ing the device using AIS’s FreeSpaceCleaner.
All tests are run four times and only averages are shown.
