Kingston DataTraveler Hyper X Predator 512GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive Review (Disassembly Piks Included)

ATTO DISK BENCHMARK VER. 2.46

ATTO Disk Benchmark is perhaps one of the oldest benchmarks going and is definitely the main staple for manufacturer performance specifications. ATTO uses RAW or compressible data and, for our benchmarks, we use a set length of 256mb and test both the read and write performance of various transfer sizes ranging from 0.5 to 8192kb. Manufacturers prefer this method of testing as it deals with raw (compressible) data rather than random (includes incompressible data) which, although more realistic, results in lower performance results.

Although we came close to reaching 240MB/s read performance, we were very disappointed that our write performance only reached 72MB/s, considering listed performance is 160MB/s.  We repeated the tests, with similar results, a number of times and wondered whether it was a ‘software specific’ glitch.

CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER. 3.0 X64

Crystal Disk Benchmark is used to measure read and write performance through sampling of highly compressible data (oFill/1Fill), or random data which is, for the most part, incompressible. In the Predator, we have provided the result with random data samples as both results were extremely similar.

Performance was up to par when we conducted Crystal DiskMark testing and, in fact, exceeded listed specifications considerably.  Something that we knew would show it’s ugly face, however, were those very low 512K, 4K and 4K-QD32 results that is directly the result of the controller in use.  We are certain of this as a result of our previous review of the SuperTalent Express RC8, where we saw performance as high as 169 times better when comparing the 512K write transfer results while using a LSI SandForce SF-1200 flash storage processor.

ANVIL STORAGE UTILITIES PROFESSIONAL (BETA)

You may not see this for long (and its definitely not common) but you get a freebee simply for reading!  Over the last little while, we have been assisting with beta testing new benchmark software called Anvil Storage Utilities which is an absolutely amazing SSD benchmarking utility.  Not only does it have a preset SSD benchmark, but also, it has included such things as endurance testing and threaded I/O read, write and mixed tests, all of which are very simple to understand and utilize in our benchmark testing.

Anvil Storage Utilities is the most comprehensive benchmark available and displays such things as disk access times, IOPS and transfer speeds within a single result.  The difference between a solid state drive and a flash drive become most evident here, thoughts of which will be looked at more closely in our conclusions.