Performance
Performance has been tested on the AMD Ryzen platform equipped with Ryzen 7 5900X CPU, ASUS Crosshair VIII Impact, and 32GB of Patriot Viper Elite II DDR4-4000 memory kit (which will be reviewed soon). All tests were performed in Windows 10 Pro x64 environment with the latest updates.
Let’s begin with the ATTO Disk Benchmark, one of the most popular applications designed to measure storage bandwidth.
ATTO benchmark surprised me the most. The Rage Prime flash drive reached 878MB/s read bandwidth, and 880MB/s write bandwidth! This is simply amazing. Results were repeatable, no matter how many times I was running the benchmark.
To test random operations, we are usually using CrystalDiskMark. This is one of the best storage benchmarks, and it’s also free.
CrystalDiskMark results are better than what we can achieve on a SATA III SSD, reaching 620MB/s. This is maybe not as spectacular as 880MB/s in the ATTO benchmark, but still great. All other results are also good, including 38MB/s in low queue 4k read what is very close to what we can see on faster SATA III SSD.
Considering exceptional results in previous benchmarks, I was a bit disappointed about the results in PCMark 10. These results are still very high for a USB flash drive. On the other hand, SATA III SSD, which would be worse in a direct comparison in ATTO and CrystalDiskMark, would be twice as fast in PCMark 10. We can assume that these long tests activated thermal throttling, and that’s why the performance is lower than expected.
Anvil’s Storage Utilities benchmark usually shows lower bandwidth, but 500MB/s+ is still high. No thermal throttling in this benchmark.
I was curious to see how IOPS looks on Rage Prime, and it’s not bad at all. Up to 70k IOPS in two different benchmarks is again amazing.
A longer investigation gave us some answers about the performance while the Rage Prime is overheating. Just after a long benchmark like PCMark 10, we started CrystalDiskMark, then the bandwidth was between 200-300MB/s until the temperature went down to mid 70°C. So it’s not like the high temperature will cause the drive to stop working, but it will be slower. Even if the throttling activates, then Rage Prime is still one of the fastest flash drives on the market. We just wish it could run at a lower temperature.
The temperature problem appears almost only when we connect the Rage Prime to a USB 3.2 Gen 2, and it works at its full speed. Once connected to the 3.2 Gen1 port, the temperature is up to 65°C, and the bandwidth is around 400-450MB/s without any throttling.
