Performance
This portion of the review is going to primarily be pictures but I will break them up some with comments.
Boot time
With a fresh install of Windows 10, Empty drive (minus Windows files) and all startup processes disabled the UD PRO booted from off to login screen in a pretty impressive 17 seconds.
With a mostly full (4GB free) drive, and all startup processes disabled the UD Pro was still able to boot pretty quick coming in at 19 seconds for my off to login test.
It certainly seems that Gigabyte knew what they were doing when they added the external DDR3L Cache since the drive only slows down 2 seconds when the drive is almost entirely full.
I rate the boot time 5/5 since you’re getting a drive at a budget price that can boot into windows in less than 20 seconds!
Gaming load times
For the game load time test, I used a drive that was nearly full, partly to test the worst case scenario and partially so I could have multiple games on the drive at one time. So if the drive is not as full you could expect load times a few seconds faster.
The Witcher 3
When loading into the middle of Novigrad (I prefer this area because a lot has to load) I was able to go from the main menu to gameplay in 26 seconds which is exactly what I’d expect for an SSD in this price point.
GTA5
Loading into GTA5 took a little longer coming in at 34 seconds to load from the main menu to gameplay, still fast for a standard SSD but pretty much equal to other similarly priced SSD’s.
Wolfinstein 2
And finally, for the gaming load times, I used Wolfenstein 2 in order to test a game that loads smaller levels instead of an open world.
The load times here were pretty dang fast loading from the main menu to gameplay in 9 seconds, this is really fast but also exactly the same as another non Gigabyte SSD that is priced the same as the UD PRO.
Overall load time performance was impressive but not mind blowingly better than other similarly priced SSDs, But this isn’t a bad thing since the UD Pro has some other nice features that a lot of the similarly priced SSDs don’t have.
I rate the gaming load time performance 5/5. Even though it doesn’t drastically outperform other SSDs in this category I can’t complain since it performs exactly how a 59$ SSD should.
Benchmark performance
ATTO
In the picture above I ran the ATTO benchmark on a mostly empty (minus windows files) UD PRO, For this test I turned all of the settings to the max including the Queue depth and file size. As you can see the read speeds max out slightly above the rated max speed of 530MB/s with the write speeds being a bit lower maxing out a little above 300MB/s. Impressive and I’ll take any free performance the drive will give me but also expected for this drive, still no complaints about this test.
Next, I ran nearly the same test with the UD PRO almost full, Performance was nearly the same coming in about 1-2MB/s slower in most test but very impressive since a lot of other drives slow down quite a bit as they fill up. While raw speed isn’t anything drastically impressive here, the fact that it can maintain nearly the same empty performance when its full is very impressive so major plus here!
Crystal Disk Mark
Empty
In the gallery above I ran the Crystal Disk Mark benchmark on the empty UD PRO with maximum settings three separate times.
As you can see above the speeds were pretty impressive with read speeds decently higher than the advertised 530MB/s. One interesting thing is the read speeds managed to get higher after each test while the write speeds slowed down slightly, this could be due to the added cache filling up leading to more data being quickly accessible but with less room to write data to the cache.
Overall while empty the UD PRO performs slightly better than average for a standard SSD, The read speeds were quite impressive with write speeds and random access speeds being normal but nothing absurdly fast. Still, I have no complaints here and so far the UD PRO has performed great considering it’s price.
Full
As you can see in the gallery above even when full the UD PRO delivers very good performance with overall performance either the same or only a few MB/s slower when compared to the empty drive. One oddity is this drive actually performs better at random access speeds when full, at first I thought this was due to the lower overall file size so I re ran the empty benchmark with a 4GB size and performance ended being the same as the early empty test. I have no clue why the random speeds improve with a drive that is nearly full but I’ll take any extra performance.
Overall I was really impressed with how well this drive performs when full, most drives including SSD’s slow down a lot when full but Gigabyte seems to have some tricks up their sleeves to keep this drive from slowing down any significant amount when full.
Now, let’s move onto the conclusion and final score!
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