Blackbird MX-1 USB 3.1 PCIe Card Review – USB 3.1 Type-A & Type-C ports

By Nathan Kirsch

ATTO Disk Benchmark

ATTO v3.05

ATTO is one of the oldest drive benchmarks still being used today and is still very relevant in the SSD world. ATTO measures transfers across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and places the data into graphs that can be very easily interpreted. The test was run with the default runs of 0.5KB through 8192KB transfer sizes with the total length being 256MB.

HyperX Savage 240GB SSD on SATA III:

atto-sata

HyperX Savage 240GB SSD w/ ASUS USB Type-C Card & Inateck FD2008C:

savage-atto

HyperX Savage 240GB SSD w/ Blackbird MX-1 Type-C Card & Inateck FD2008C:

blackbird-atto

Benchmark Results: ATTO showed Kingston HyperX Savage 240GB SSD maxing out at 564 MB/s read and 543MB/s write in the standard overlapped I/O benchmark when connected to the ASUS X99 Sabertooth motherboard when directly connecting the drive to the SATA III interface. When we placed the same exact SSD into the Inateck FD2008C 2.5-inch USB Type-C drive enclosure we tested it on the ASUS USB Type-C and Blackbird MX-1 add-in cards on their USB Type-C ports. We hit 464MB/s read and 442MB/s write on the ASUS card and then 465MB/s read and 444MB/s write on the Blackbird MX-1. The two cards are close enough in performance to say there is no significant difference between the two.