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

By Nathan Kirsch

CrystalDiskMark 5.0.2 x64

CrystalDiskMark is a small benchmark utility for drives and enables rapid measurement of sequential and random read/write speeds. Note that CDM only supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ) with a queue depth of 32 (as noted) for the last listed benchmark score. This can skew some results in favor of controllers that also do not support NCQ.

HyperX Savage 240GB SSD on SATA III:

cdm-sata

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

cdm--usb

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

blackbird-cdm

Benchmark Results: The HyperX Savage 240GB SSD 547MB/s read and 528MB/s write on the sequential test when we ran the drive on the CrystalDiskMark storage test with the default settings (incompressible data). We then placed the same exact SSD into the Inateck FD2008C 2.5-inch USB Type-C drive enclosure and tested it on the ASUS USB Type-C and Blackbird MX-1 add-in cards USB Type-C ports. We hit 398MB/s read and 425MB/s write on the ASUS card and then 400MB/s read and 425MB/s write on the Blackbird MX-1. The two cards are again close enough in performance to say there is no significant difference between the two.