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First up, we used SiSoft SANDRA, the the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant for some quick tests. The File System Test runs on a specified partition, so we ensured that the entire drive was dedicated to a single volume. Read and write performance metrics, along with the overall drive score, are detailed below.

SANDRA reports three scores: read, write, and an overall value represented as GB per second. In our write tests, the Swordfish finds itself as expected towards the bottom of the pack but still above the Addlink S70. A single test in, however, and the value of an NVMe drive already proves itself with transfer speeds twice that of SATA drives. For a mere $15 more, however, the Falcon acquits itself nicely with an average performance boost of around one third in both the read and write averages versus its lower-priced sibling.

ATTO Disk Benchmark For more information: http://bit.ly/btuV6w

ATTO is a "quick and dirty" type of disk benchmark that measures transfer speeds across a specific volume length which, like SANDRA, uses a formatted partition. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and graphs them out in an easily interpreted chart. We chose .5KB through 64MB transfer sizes and a queue depth of 6 over a total max volume length of 256MB. ATTO's workloads are sequential in nature and measure raw bandwidth, rather than I/O response time, access latency, etc.

ATTO shows how each drive copes with transfers of varying sizes all the way up to 64 MB, where at this point the drive should pretty well be maxed out in terms of read and write speeds. If we ignore the premium-priced PCIe 4.0 Sabrent Rocket 4.0, we see that the speedy Falcon hits, and even slightly exceeds, its theoretical read and write specifications once the transfer size hits 512 kB and hangs in with the similarly priced Corsair and Addlink drives. It doesn't really set itself apart, but it's certainly a viable option. The Swordfish also hits its performance targets, but those targets are much lower so it brings up the rear. It also reaches its peak much more quickly, at a file size of 32 kB. At that low file size and smaller, the two ADATA drives perform equally, and just a touch behind the others in our test.

The bigger an input or output operation is, the longer it takes and therefore the entire right side of each I/O graph is completely expected. By the time we hit 8 MB, all of our drives have dropped low enough in I/O count to make it appear they've flatlined when in fact they are still transferring bigger blocks of data more infrequently. On the Write graph, the other unexpected behavior is that these drives from ADATA struggle mightily to keep up. If you flip back to our Samsung SSD 870 QVO review, those write figures more closely align to SATA drives than NVMe storage.

On the other hand, the very slow start both drives get off to is very unusual, but they do abnormally well at 4 kB transactions, too. The good news is that 4 kB is the cluster size on an NTFS-formatted drive. It seems that ADATA has tuned these drives for the best performance at the 4 kB block size, another behavior shared with SATA SSDs rather than other NVMe devices.

AS SSD Compression Benchmark Bring your translator - http://bit.ly/aRx11n

Next up we ran the Compression Benchmark built-into AS SSD, an SSD specific benchmark being developed by Alex Intelligent Software. This test uses a progressively more compressible data set to blast data at the drive and read it back. If the drive can optimize its write speed using data compression, the result will be that more compressible loads write more quickly to the drive. We only graphed a small fraction of the data, at 1% compressible, 50% compressible, and 100% compressible data, but the details bear out that this trend is representative of the benchmark’s complete results.