Synthetic Benchmarks - The Samsung Portable SSD X5 Review

Synthetic Benchmarks

Various synthetic benchmarks are available to quickly evaluate the performance of direct-attached storage devices. Real-world performance testing often has to be a customized test. We present both varieties in this review, starting with the synthetic benchmarks in this section. Prior to covering those, we have a quick look at our testbed setup and testing methodology.

Testbed Setup and Testing Methodology

Evaluation of DAS units on Windows is done with the testbed outlined in the table below. For devices with a Thunderbolt 3 (Type-C interface) connections (such as the Samsung Portable SSD X5 1TB that we are considering today), we utilize the Thunderbolt 3 / USB 3.1 Type-C port enabled by the Intel Alpine Ridge controller. It connects to the Z170 PCH via a PCIe 3.0 x4 link..

The full details of the reasoning behind choosing the above build components can be found here. The list of DAS units used for comparison purposes is provided below.

• Samsung Portable SSD X5 1TB (NTFS)
• DIY TEKQ Rapide - SanDisk Extreme Pro TB3 SSD 1TB
• LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt 500GB
• Patriot Evlvr TB3 SSD 1TB
• Samsung Portable SSD X5 1TB (exFAT)
• TEKQ Rapide TB3 SSD 240GB (NTFS)
• TEKQ Rapide TB3 SSD 240GB (exFAT)
• d2 TB2 - SSD

ATTO and Crystal DiskMark

Samsung claims read and write speeds of 2800 MBps and 2300 MBps respectively, and these are backed up by the ATTO benchmarks provided below. Unfortunately, these access traces are not very common in real-life scenarios.

Drive Performance Benchmarks - ATTO

CrystalDiskMark, despite being a canned benchmark, provides a better estimate of the performance range with a selected set of numbers. As evident from the screenshot below, the performance can dip to as low as 46 MBps for 4K random reads at low queue depths.

Drive Performance Benchmarks - CrystalDiskMark

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