Performance
The performance has been tested on the DELL Latitude 5340 laptop with Win11 Pro x64. Everything else is less important as it doesn’t affect the PD20M SSD performance.
Let’s begin as usual with the ATTO Disk Benchmark.
Results in the ATTO benchmark are, as usual, slightly lower than expected but still not so far from the 2GB/s mark. The maximum read bandwidth is 1.93GB/s, while the maximum write bandwidth is 1.74GB/s. It’s one of the fastest USB 3.2 Gen2x2 SSDs we tested in ATTO.
CrystalDiskMark shows us better results, even up to 2070MB/s. The previously tested M200 SSD from Team Group was significantly faster in the RND4K Q1T1 test, but it’s more important only if we work directly on the SSD with many small files.
The PD20M shows some great results, considering it’s a portable SSD.
In PCMark 10, the results are also exceptional for the USB SSD and also one of the best for portable SSDs.
The 3DMark Storage Benchmark score is not the highest, but we won’t play games on this SSD. The score is still pretty good.
Anvil’s Storage Utilities is a rather old benchmark but is still popular. This benchmark usually shows lower results than the ATTO or the CrystalDiskMark. We can see lower-than-expected bandwidth on the PD20M SSD. However, it’s still not so far from the declared bandwidth.
Results in the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test suggest we may have problems with 12K resolution. I don’t think it affects many users, so it’s not an issue.
In the end, the AIDA64 Disk Benchmark focused on linear read and write.
Random read and random write tests take way too long on USB devices and do not give us results that could be translated into daily work on portable storage, so I skipped them in this review.
Results in AIDA64 show that we won’t have problems with the read bandwidth, but during extended writes, the SSD may get some hiccups. It’s probably caused by limited cache as the same happens on some M.2 SSDs. The same is not happening in mixed load tests or writes on many small files. The SSD could still keep about 650MB/s continuous bandwidth for nearly two hours, while many competitive SSDs would drop to 100-200MB/s.
The PD20M is slower than the M200 SSD but is still one of the best-performing portable SSDs on the market. It would be even better if it was available at higher capacities as 2TB is optimal for most users, but 4TB is getting more popular.
