Legit Memory Reviews

Super Talent ST1 and ST2 USB 3.0 Flash Drive Review

Manufacturer: Super Talent
Product: ST3U4ST1K & ST3U8EST2
Date: Wed, Jul 18, 2012 - 12:00 AM
Written By: Nathan Kirsch -
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Benchmarking The USB 3.0 Drives

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1

CrystalDiskMark is a small HDD benchmark utility for your hard drive that enables you to rapidly measure sequential and random read/write speeds.

CrystalDiskMark

ST1: The first thing I noticed was that these don’t even come close to the claimed speeds of 90MB/s read and 16MB/s write. That being said, this may be happening because we have the smallest capacity drive of this series, which would mean less NAND chips onboard.

CrystalDiskMark

ST2: The ST2 actually beat the expected write speeds by over 2MB/s. Unfortunately, the write speeds were almost half of what was expected. Again, I expect that this is due to this being the smallest capacity drive in its series, so less NAND chips.

ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.41

ATTO is one of the oldest hard drive benchmarks that is still used today. ATTO measures transfers across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and places the data into graphs that you can easily interpret. The test was run with the default runs of 0.5kb through 8192kb transfer sizes with the total length being 256mb.

ATTO

ST1: Running ATTO on our ST1 4GB drive, we can see that it reached about 63MB/s read and about 7.7MB/s write. These speeds are comparable to the CrystalDiskMark speeds, but still aren’t quite what we had expected.

ATTO

Just like the CrystalDiskMark speeds for this drive, our read speeds were right around 69.8MB/s which is higher than the expected 67MB/s for this drive. Unfortunately, at just 13.5MB/s write speed we’re still short of the expected 24MB/s.

HD Tune Pro 5.00 Benchmarking

HD Tune Pro 5.00 is an extended version of HD Tune which includes many new features such as write benchmark, secure erasing, AAM setting, folder usage view, disk monitor, command line parameters and file benchmark.

HD Tune Pro
HD Tune Pro

ST1: The Super Talent USB Express 3.0 ST1 averaged 43MB/s read, but performance dropped big time on once the drive reached the 50% capacity point.

HD Tune Pro
HD Tune Pro

ST2: The Super Talent USB Express 3.0 ST2 with MLC NAND didn't have any performance drop across the Flash drive and averaged 67MB/s, which is the drives rated speed. 

Next Page - Free Capacity & Final Thoughts


Review Index
Page 1 - Super Talent Express 3.0 Flash Drives
Page 2 - The Test System
Page 3 - Benchmarking The USB 3.0 Drives
Page 4 - Free Capacity & Final Thoughts