Performance
Performance has been tested on the latest AMD Ryzen platform, which contains the R9 3900X processor and ASUS Crosshair VIII Impact motherboard. All tests were performed in the Windows 10 x64 environment.
Let’s begin with the ATTO Disk Benchmark, which is one of the most popular applications designed to measure storage bandwidth.
The BOLT B80 performs clearly better than declared. As we can see in the specifications table, we were expecting to see around 500MB/s read and 450MB/s write, while in our tests, there is up to 541MB/s read and 506MB/s write. That’s around 10% more.
CrystalDiskMark is showing a bit lower results but still exceptional and much above the declared. In this case, we could achieve up to 526MB/s read and 436MB/s write bandwidth. It looks excellent, especially that we are using USB ports.
Below we can see some more demanding benchmarks which are usually related to the whole system performance rather than an external drive designed for storing the data. It still shows how the drive is acting in a mixed load environment.
Both PCMark benchmarks are not showing us any amazing results, but what we see is still respectable, considering that in use is a USB drive. We won’t run an operating system from this drive, so it doesn’t matter much. On the other hand, we can have many small files or larger projects on the drive itself, and then the performance will still be satisfying.
One more benchmark, more for the reference. Anvil’s Storage Utilities is also showing some high numbers but lower than in previous synthetic bandwidth benchmarks.
I’m sure that all those users who are looking for a fast USB drive will be satisfied. Some drives are based on PCIe SSD, but let’s be honest, not many computers have fast enough USB ports to really see the difference. USB 3.1 standard will offer optimal performance for some longer and will be slowly replaced by faster devices.
