Performance

So for performance testing, I already know just how fast the Rocket Q drive is and frankly, USB 3.2 isn’t fast enough to get anywhere close to the full potential out of the drive. But I was curious to see how the enclosure and drive performed overall so I ran our normal external SSD tests. This started with CrystalDiskMark which had the sequential read speed at 1024 and write speed at 959 MB/s.

 

ATTO disk benchmark showed similarly. You can see as it runs through the tests that it peaks very early and stays where for the rest of the tests with USB 3.2 being the limitation. ATTO’s IOPS were in the 29,000 range for both read and writes up until the file sizes reached 16KB and larger then slowly dropped down.

 

 

Anvils showed similar as well with the Read IOPS being 26514 but the write IOPS were much higher on the 4K 16 queue depth test at 73746. MB/s were in the mid 800’s though with 891 for read speeds and 851 for writes.

 

I then jumped into my favorite testing, real-world tests using three different file types. I tested using word documents, specifically stacks of new and old reviews. These are very small in size and are always the slowest to transfer. I saw around 4.8 MB/s when moving them from my SSD to the portable enclosure. Then taking them off the drive back to the PC was slower at 3.52 MB/s.

Documents to Drive

Documents to PC

I then did movies which are huge files and take advantage of sequential transfer speeds. Copying multiple movie files ran around 616 MB/s to the enclosure and 757 MB/s when going back to the PC. 

Movies to Drive

Movies to PC

I then did photos which were a mix of RAW and JPGs which are a lot larger than the documents in file size but much smaller than movies. Copying to the enclosure saw 518 MB/s but interestingly enough going back to the PC saw 1.1 GB/s which was extremely fast and around the peak of the USB 3.2 transfer speed.

Pictures to Drive

Pictures to PC

I then jumped into AIDA64 for their drive tests which I use as more of a torture test. I run these for a half hour. This is partially to heat the drive for thermal images but also to see if long term transfers show any slowdowns. The read test was rock solid at 932 MB/s for basically the entire 36 minutes with very little fluctuation. The write test on the other hand jumped up and down constantly. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this on writes for an external and it didn’t take long for it to start. We know this isn’t the Rocket Q drive, so it must be a limitation of the USB controller in the enclosure.

During the extended testing, I was surprised to see that the thick aluminum enclosure had hardly heated up. You can see just how much hotter even trivial parts of the motherboard were in comparison.