Just how fast is it?
We're comparing straight-line performance against another external SSD represented by Buffalo. Adding more spice, we're also including results from a 2TB spinner from WD. The trio of drives are connected (using the same cable) to a PC featuring a Samsung 830 SSD as the boot drive.
Sequential transfer test results don't quite match up to specification, though the internal SSD is consistent in peak read/write performance and, potentially, up to twice as fast as a WD drive housing a 2.5in mechanical drive.
One academic method of showing just how fast SSDs can be is to run a 4K test. Transcend's ESD200 is miles faster than the WD, as expected, but not as nippy as the Crucial m4 inside the Buffalo MiniStation.
Putting some real-world context to the results, we move a Steam folder to-and-fro the host PC. 26.5GB in size and containing 10,008 files, the transfer is a good proxy for the kind of data movements we expect users of this kind of storage to engage in.
Being able to write 26.5GB in just over four minutes highlights the benefits of super-fast external storage. Going the other way, to the PC, and it takes less than three minutes to transfer the data back. But, as the graph shows, the faster read speed of the Buffalo is telling here.
How about writing to the entire drive? We can set Iometer to create a single, drive-filling test file and time how long it takes. Iometer completed the test in just over 27 minutes, thus averaging almost 150MB/s.
