Performance
The performance has been tested on the Intel platform, which contains the i7-14700K CPU, ASUS Z790 APEX motherboard, 32GB KLEVV BOLT V DDR5-6800 memory kit, and Nvidia RTX 4070 graphics card.
All tests were performed in a Windows 11 Pro x64 environment with the latest updates.
As usual, in my storage reviews, I will start with the ATTO Disk Benchmark. It’s one of the most popular storage benchmarks, and results are easy to compare at home.
The ATTO Benchmark results are pretty good. In this benchmark, we barely ever see the bandwidth matching the specifications, so a bit lower results are still fine. The S1 SSD reached 1.87GB/s write, and 1.73GB/s read, so not great but perfectly normal for this type of SSD.
The CrystalDiskMark results are significantly better. On our test rig, we can see up to 1.9GB/s read and around 2GB/s write. It’s hard to explain why, on this specific motherboard, the write bandwidth is always higher, and additional caching, which usually helps in writes, isn’t enabled.
Random low queue (Q1T1) read could be better, as we have seen similar performance shelf SSDs passing 30MB/s, but our result is not bad. Since it’s a USB SSD, then it doesn’t matter much.
The PCMark 10 Storage benchmark results are also not bad for a USB SSD, but again, they could be a bit better.
The same story applies to the 3DMark Storage Benchmark. We typically aim for a flat 1k score in this benchmark and USB 3.2 Gen2x2 SSDs. We should still read the result as above average or simply pretty good.
The last test is AIDA64, which is quite demanding. The linear read test shows high performance, with an average of 1668.7GB/s. We can also see that the CPU load is very low – up to 1%.
The linear write test looks much worse, with an average slightly below 300MB/s. It’s still fast for daily work, but we could expect better results.
We had no problems with the S1 SSD during our tests. Everything passed without issues. Some tests showed exceptional results, while others could have been better. Overall, the performance is about average for a USB 3.2 Gen2x2 SSD, and the S1 SSD is still worth recommending, considering all other advantages, like high-end design.
