The advent of 3D TLC flash memory and high-speed interfaces such as USB 3.1 Gen 2 and Thunderbolt 3 has resulted in many affordable, high-performance direct-connect devices on the market. These are basically SATA or PCIe SSDs behind a SATA-USB 3.1 Gen 2 bridge or Thunderbolt 3 controller. SATA SSDs behind a USB bridge are very affordable. And for normal consumer workloads, performance is very good. Among them, Seagate Fast SSD and SanDisk Extreme portable SSD are such products, which are designed for the mid-end consumer market.
SanDisk is an American multinational company that designs and sells flash memory card products. It was founded in 1988 by Eli Harari and non-volatile memory technology expert Sanjay Mehrotra and listed on Nasdaq in November 1995. It is headquartered in Milpitas, California, and has offices around the world. SanDisk's products mainly include: CF card, SD card, TF card, U disk, Memory Stick (memory stick), card reader, SSD solid state drive, mp3. In May 2016, Western Digital completed the price of 16 billion US dollars. the acquisition of SanDisk.
SanDisk or Western Digital has always been an active player in the high-performance external SSD market. The Extreme 500, 510 and 900 series external drives are all highly marketable and reliable alternatives to other external SSDs on the market, such as the Samsung T1, T3 and T5 models. The SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD is its latest high-performance external storage device that builds on the features of the Extreme 510 while addressing some minor issues related to form factor, connector layout and thermal throttling.
And Seagate's flash-based portfolio, which includes some internal consumer-grade SSDs, is the company's focus. At CES 2018, they announced the launch of the first Seagate-branded high-performance external storage device, the Seagate Fast SSD.
The new SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD is IP55 rated for dust and dust, but the built-in USB 3.1 Gen chip also speeds up transfers while maximizing cross-platform compatibility. It also has a new sleek case design that's more appealing than the perforated matte finish the company has used in the past.
The size of the device is 8.85mm x 45.55mm x 96mm, and the weight is only 39 grams. The product is bus powered. To ensure wider compatibility, SanDisk also offers a small Type C to Type A 6" adapter. In addition to this, it comes with a warranty card and a quick start guide.
The Seagate Express SSD is square, measuring 9mm x 79mm x 94mm, with a total weight of 82 grams.
Like the SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD, this Seagate product is also bus-powered. It has an interesting value-added service which is a free two-month Adobe Creative Cloud Photograpy Plan.
The CrystalDiskInfo test results are as follows:
Both drives support SMART and TRIM across the USB bridge.
Western Digital My Passport SSD is equipped with SanDisk X400 (15nm TLC). The Extreme Portable SSD is equipped with a Western Digital Blue 3D NAND SSD (BiCS 64-layer 3D TLC flash memory) with a Marvell 88SS1074 SSD controller.
SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD Teardown
We can clearly see that the ASMIATASM55CM acts as a SATA - USB 3.1 Gen 2 bridge chip. Both the motherboard and daughter board are single-sided, and the only thermal protection is a single thermal sticker on the flash pack, SSD controller, DRAM, and bridge.
The Seagate Fast SSD uses the same motherboard as the Seagate Brracuta SSD. It also uses Toshiba BICS 64-layer 3D TLC. Despite the Seagate logo on the packaging, the controller is likely a newly branded Phison S10.
Seagate Fast SSD disassembly diagram
It can be seen from the disassembly diagram that this SSD uses a metal casing with thermal protection. Similar to the SanDisk Extreme portable SSD, the Fast SSD motherboard also has an ASMITEASM23 5CM bridge chip.
Both Seagate Fast SSD and SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD come with EXFAT formatted default volumes. We can reformat in NTFS for benchmarking and make sure TRIM can be activated.
SanDisk Extreme Portable SSDs come with SecureAccess software for password-protecting the drive. And it also comes with a link to download Sea.Toolkit, which can set up automatic backups and syncs from select folders on your PC to the Fast SSD.
Overall, the drive experience is largely similar. While Seagate's 18-inch dual-cable package is easily compatible with different system setups, SanDisk's is not. And the cable with the labelled Type-C to Type-A adapter is more convenient to use and carry.
Benchmarks
Various synthetic benchmarks are available to quickly evaluate the performance of storage devices. The actual performance tests used are usually custom tests. This article will give the test results of these two products, first briefly introduce our test platform and test method.
Evaluation of DAS units on Windows was done using the test benches listed in the table below. For devices with a USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C interface, such as the Seagate Fast SSD and SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD, we utilize the Intel Alpine Ridge enabled Thunderbolt 3/USB 3.1 Type-C port controller. It connects to the Z170 PCH via a PCIe 3.0 x4 link.
Below is a list of DAS units for several product comparisons.
Seagate Fast SSD 1TB SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD 1TB Samsung Portable SSD T1 1TB - No Encryption Samsung Portable SSD T3 2TB Samsung Portable SSD T5 2TB SanDisk Extreme 900 1.92TB Western Digital My Passport SSD 1TB
Although CrystalDiskMark is a pre-made benchmark, it provides a better estimate of the performance range with a set of numbers. As you can see from the screenshots below, the 4K random read performance of the Seagate Fast SSD and the 25 MBps performance of the SanDisk Extreme Portable can drop to 20 MBps under similar circumstances. The key point is that Seagate Fast SSD has a slight advantage over SanDisk Extreme Portable, which can be used for low queue depth sequential reads and writes.
Performance Conformance Test
Next, we will introduce the performance of Seagate Fast SSD and SanDisk Extreme portable SSD in real-world workloads.
Benchmarks: robocopy and PCMark 8 storage bench
Our approach to DAS unit testing also considers common use cases for such devices. The most common use case is transferring large numbers of photos and videos to and from a device. Another use case is to import files directly from DAS into multimedia editing programs such as Adobe Photoshop.
To address the first use case, we created three test folders with the following characteristics:
Photos: 4320 photos in 61 subfolders, totaling 1520 GB (RAW and JPEG) Videos: 244 videos in 6 subfolders, totaling 16.1 GB (MP4 and MOV) BR: IDT Benchmark Blu-ray 10.7 GB Blu-ray folder (the same one we used in our robocopy test of the NAS system)
read pictures
picture writing
video reading
video writing
Blu-ray file reading
Blu-ray file writing
For the second use case, we leveraged the storage platform of the PC Mark 8. Storage workloads involve games as well as multimedia editing applications. The command line version allows us to pick storage traces to run on the target drive. We have chosen the following way.
Adobe Photoshop (Light)Adobe Photoshop (Heavy)Adobe After EffectsAdobe Illustrator
Normally, PC Mark 8 will report the completion time, but the detailed log report has the read and write bandwidth numbers we show in the performance graph. Note that the bandwidth numbers reported in the results do not involve idle time compression. The results may seem low, but that's part of the workload characteristics. And all DAS units use the same testbed. Therefore, it should be possible to compare across different DAS units.
performance consistency
Issues affecting performance consistency presumably include thermal throttling and firmware caps on access rates to avoid overheating or other similar conditions. This aspect is an important factor because users want to see transfer rates up to USB 2.0 speeds when copying 100 GB of data to a flash drive. To determine if the drive under test had this issue, we instrumented our robocopy DAS benchmark file to record the read and write transfer rates of the flash drive while the robocopy process took place in the background. Additionally, we also recorded the drive's internal temperature during the process. The figure below shows the observed data during actual processing.
Seagate Fast SSDs have higher instantaneous transfer rates and complete our workloads faster than SanDisk Extreme Portable SSDs. While other drives showed consistent performance (unless thermal limits were in place), we saw the Fast SSD drop write rates to the 50 MBps range, then recover at a slightly lower rate. This indicates that the SLC cache is exhausted, and the drive is finding it a bit challenging to restore performance while still trying to keep the host occupied.
When it comes to cooling, none of the SSDs have throttling issues. By the end of our benchmark program, the Fast SSD was up around 52C. SanDisk Extreme Portable is about 65C. The sealing and IP55 rating of the Extreme Portable SSD is a challenge for cooling, but the good news is that consumers are unlikely to experience limitations in everyday use.
One thing to note here is that the first three blue and green areas correspond to 15.6 GB of writes and reads, respectively.
other
After removing the SSD volume, we set up the fio workload to write sequential data to the raw drive with a block size of 128K and an iodepth of 32 to cover 90% of the drive capacity. Record the internal temperature, the instantaneous write data rate and the total amount of data written up to that point in time.
The Seagate Fast SSD appears to have a 67C cutoff before thermal throttling kicks in. After that, write speeds dropped to around 100 MBps (even as low as 10 - 20 MBps). The maximum temperature of the SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD is 75°C, and the speed after thermal throttling is reduced to 50 MBps. However, the device attempted to recover peak write performance frequently, consistent with the behavior of the Seagate Fast SSD.
In the above test we also determined the SLC cache size and the maximum write data rate. The graph below shows the transfer rate and total data transfer from the start of the fio workload to the approximate timestamp when the transfer rate drops significantly.
The Seagate Fast SSD shows two inflection points. The first is about after a 12GB data transfer (pictured above). This is due to a move from the SLC cache to writing data directly to the TLC region, or a slowdown when transferring data from the cache to the TLC region. And the SanDisk Extreme portable SSD only showed a drop after more than 250GB of data was continuously written. This is due to thermal throttling.
SSDs being considered for use today are bus powered and cannot consume more than 4.5W of peak power consumption to maintain compatibility with as many systems as possible. A detailed analysis of the power consumption curve is still necessary. Track the bus power consumption of two SSDs while processing CrystalDiskMark workloads using a pluggable USBC-TKEY. Set the workload interval to 30 seconds.
The Seagate Fast SSD peaks at up to 5W, while the SanDisk Extreme Portable hits 3.4W. The latter is obviously more energy efficient.
Both SSDs perform well, with the Seagate Fast SSD having higher short-term write transfer rates for real-world workloads, and the SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD matching it.
When it comes to pricing, we find Seagate at a disadvantage. The Fast SSD is $280, SanDisk is $225, and the T5 1TB is $250. This could reduce Seagate's competitive advantage in competing on price.
Fast SSD does come with some value-added features, such as simple backup and sync software, and an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. If the price difference between the Fast SSD and the SanDisk Extreme Portable is between $5 and $10, the value-add might help skew the choice in favor of the former. Currently, the 1TB version of the SanDisk Extreme Portable is very attractive, priced at $0.23/GB. Compared to Samsung T5, it has the same performance, lower price and IP55 rating. The choice of the SanDisk Extreme Portable is a no-brainer for advanced users. That said, the Seagate Fast SSD does come out on top in many typical DAS workloads involving burst writes. Some consumers may appreciate this. However, at $280 (compared to SanDisk's $225), it seems hard to make it a hit.
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