Performance
Performance has been measured on a couple of USB 3.0 controllers available on popular motherboards and in new laptops. Presented results were however made on an ASUS Rampage V Extreme motherboard with Intel USB 3.0 controller. The main reason is USB 3.0 controllers speed which is less than satisfying on most devices. Depends from used motherboard maximum bandwidth can vary a lot. In our case worst USB 3.0 controllers couldn’t perform much faster than about 260MB/s while the best one – found on already mentioned ASUS Rampage V Extreme motherboard, could reach transfers slightly above 430MB/s. I assume that Lexar Workflow DD512 can reach declared maximum bandwidth if we find fast enough USB 3.0 controller.
Maybe let’s move to the tests.
ATTO Disk Benchmark
As I already mentioned, Lexar DD512 is limited by USB 3.0 controller speed so we can see maximum bandwidth about 430MB/s in sequential read tests. It’s still really good for a USB 3.0 backup drive.
Sequential write result in ATTO benchmark is slightly above the declared maximum bandwidth of 245MB/s. We can see transfers of nearly 251MB/s what of course depends from tested file size.
In general results in ATTO look really good.
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3 x64
Similar situation in sequential bandwidth we can see in CrystalDiskMark so up to 430MB/s read and 250MB/s write.
In this benchmark we can also check random bandwidth. Since it’s a backup drive it’s less interesting for us but still counts as many users may use Lexar DD512 for other purposes. Random transfers at about 10-12MB/s aren’t anything special nowadays but it’s still much faster than any HDD can offer. I don’t think anyone will use DD512 to work on databases or use it as a operating system boot drive so I think it won’t matter so much. Still it can be good as a drive for games even though it’s connected via USB.
AS SSD Benchmark
AS SSD is older benchmark and test file sizes are different than in CrystalDiskMark so also results in sequential transfers are slightly worse. Could be better but it’s not bad.
We can’t compare Lexar DD512 to any modern SSD in this tests because of USB 3.0 connection. Access time is clearly worse than on SATA connection.
Anvil’s Storage Utilities
Anvil’s benchmarks are showing similar situation as in AS SSD. Results are good but not as good as we wish to see. Probably USB 3.0 controller speed has something to do with it. Still numbers that we see are really good for backup device, especially connected to USB port.
PCMark8 – Storage Suite
Lexar DD512 is maybe not designed as a storage for games and other applications which we run directly from the drive but as we see in PCMark8, results are quite good. Total score is really impressive as it’s not much worse than what we saw in SSD reviews. Storage bandwidth in this benchmark doesn’t look high but as we see operations passed in good time of 1 hour 18 minutes and 10 seconds. Even best SSD required at least 1 hour to pass this test.
