SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD Review: Compact, Rugged USB-C External Storage

The ATTO Disk Benchmark is an easy-to-run test that samples transfer speeds across a specific volume length. It measures raw read and write transfer rates and presents the results in a handy chart. We chose .5kb through 8192kb transfer sizes and a queue depth of 6 over a total max volume length of 256MB. ATTO's workloads are sequential in nature and measure raw bandwidth, rather than I/O response time, access latency, etc.

ATTO Disk Benchmark
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ATTOWrite


ATTORead

As in the SANDRA testing, the Extreme Portable SSD is much faster than the USB thumb drive, but trails the internal drives as you would expect due to the additional overhead of USB. Read speeds are very good but start to plateau as the file sizes grow larger.

AS SSD Compression Benchmark
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Next up we ran the Compression Benchmark built into AS SSD, an SSD specific benchmark developed by Alex Intelligent Software. This test uses a mix of compressible and incompressible data and reports both Read and Write throughput results. We only graphed a small fraction of the data (1% compressible, 50% compressible, and 100% compressible), but the mostly flat curves show consistent results for compressed and non-compressed data.

ASSDR


ASSDW

The drive has a slightly slower read rate at the start of the test, but otherwise is stable regardless of the compressibility of the data being transferred across the drive.

Joel Santo Domingo

Joel Santo Domingo

Joel Santo Domingo is an award-winning technology expert with over two decades of experience with PCs and connected devices. He enjoys explaining complex tech, whether it’s describing the benefits of multi-core processors or talking about car tech. Joel used to be an IT guy but became a tech journalist specifically because he enjoyed giving clients buying advice about tech. His work appears on-line and in print on PCMag.com, Geek.com, ExtremeTech, Lifewire.com, and HotHardware.com.

Joel is proof that you can escape the retail grind: he wore a yellow polo shirt early in his tech career. Along the way, Joel earned a BA in English Literature and an MBA in Information Technology from Rutgers University. Follow Joel on Google+ and Twitter.

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