Test machine

For this review we will be using a computer with the following configuration:

Hardware:

• Motherboard: ASUSTeK P5Q-E (Intel P45 chipset)
• Processor: Intel Core2 Quad Q6600 4×2.4GHz (G0 Stepping)
• RAM: 2048 MB DDR2 800 Corsair XMS2
• GFX: Leadtek GeForce 8500GT (512MB DDR2)
• Sound: Onboard Realtek ALC882 HD audio controller
• Hard disk 1: 500GB Seagate ST3500630AS 500GB SATAII
• Hard disk 2: 500GB Seagate ST3500820AS 500GB SATAII
• Case: Thermaltake Armor Big Tower Black
• PSU: BeQuiet Straight Power 600W
• Display: 20 inch Gericom LCD
• Operating System: Windows XP Professional SP3

During our test the Maxell SSD was connected in both eSATA and USB mode. When connected via the eSATA connector, Windows identified the device as SCSI Disk Device connected to the motherboards Marvell 61XX RAID Controller.  When connected to the USB port, the SSD was shown a regular USB device.

Nero Infotool, drive connected via eSATA

Windows device properties window when connected via USB

Test applications

To test the performance of the Maxell 32GB eSATA & USB SSD, we will be using the following test applications in this review.

• HD Tune Pro
• ATTO
• CrystalDiskMark

We will start off the benchmarking section of this review by stating that we did not run many benchmarks on the Maxell series SSD drive. You may ask why we have run so few benchmarks?

SSD technology has moved so fast in the last year, that benchmarks alone are now of very limited use, and don’t really tell us much about performance and how the drive will behave in the real world. We have therefore decided to show some basic benchmarks of the Maxell drive and we will show how the Maxell performs in the real world with added real world testing.

During our tests we will compare the Maxell eSATA SSD, some SATA HDDs, as well as some conventional USB flash drives. This means we will do all the tests (benchmarks and real world tests) on the following devices.

• Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GB SATA II HDD (ST3500820AS)
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250GB SATA II HDD (ST3250820AS) connected via eSATA
• Corsair Flash Padlock 4GB USB Flash Drive
• Maxell USB Retractor 2GB USB Flash Drive

Reading Benchmark

For these tests, we will use HD Tune Pro 3.50 and will conduct reading benchmarks. As a reference we also tested the drives listed above. We would like to point out that HD Tune Pro results may differ from one system to another and results could also be operating system dependent.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3500820AS Reference test

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3500820AS reference test (SATA)

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3250820AS Reference test

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3250820AS reference test (eSATA)

Maxell eSATA & USB 32GB SSD

Maxell eSATA & USB 32GB SSD

We present the table below for comparison with other recently tested drives.

From our limited number of test samples, we can see that the Maxell SSDs reading performance is between the other tested internal and external SATA HDDs. The Access time is by far the lowest and the Burst rate the highest.

We present one more reading test to benchmark sustained reading performance, this time the HD Tune Random Access read benchmark. The Random Access test measures the performance of random read or write operations and the amount of data which will be written varies from 512 bytes to 1MB.

Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200.10 (SATA)

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3250820AS reference test (eSATA)

Maxell eSATA & USB 32GB SSD

The HD Tune Random access read test comes up with an excellent result for our Maxell eSATA & USB 32GB SSD. It is about 10 times faster than the tested conventional SATA HDD when reading really small files 512byte and 4KB.

Writing and advanced benchmarks

ATTO disk benchmark

ATTO has become a standard tool for measuring the data throughput of SSD drives. It measures the performance of reading and writing, using different file sizes and block sizes.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3500820AS Reference test

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3250820AS Reference test

Maxell eSATA & USB 32GB SSD

The test reflects the good reading performance of the drive, but when we have a look at the writing performance then we clearly see the drive behind even the eSATA Seagate HDD. However, it’s still much higher than the specs promise.

Summary:

Reading and writing speeds of the Maxell eSATA & USB 32GB SSD are good. Compared to the other drives and specs, it performs pretty well.

Advanced performance tests

CrystalDiskMark 2.2

Crystal Disk Mark is quite a handy benchmarking application, as it focuses on the file sizes that can cause a problem on a system drive.

We ran the test three times to ensure we didn’t notice any significant falloff in performance and again we compared the results to other (e)SATA HDDs. Since the results didn’t vary much, we only show the screenshot of one of the tests.

Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200.10 (SATA)

Seagate Barracuda 250GB 7200.10 (eSATA)

Maxell eSATA & USB 32GB SSD

For an easier comparison we have put the tests together in one table.

The reported results look similar to the results from benchmarks before, interestingly the device performs excellent when it comes to reading small files.

Summary

There is nothing bad to report in our benchmarks of the Maxell eSATA & USB SSD, reading performance is excellent and writing is behind other HDDs but still above the specs.

On the next page we will test the drives performance when connected to the USB port….