Inateck FE2006 Review – 2.5-inch USB 3.0 External Drive with UASP

Anvil Storage Utilities

Anvil Storage Utilities 1.1.0

Along with the move to a new platform, we decided to make a change in one of the benchmarks. There’s a relatively new benchmark called Anvil Storage Utilities that is in beta but close to production. It’s a very powerful tool that measures performance through a variety of tests which can be customized. Since some of the tests more or less duplicate what we get from other benchmarks we use already, we decided to use the IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) testing on 4kb file sizes at a queue depth of 4, 16, and 32. IOPS performance is something SSD makers tout quite a bit but we generally don’t do a lot of IOPS testing because frankly a lot of users can’t relate to IOPS metrics as well and it tends to be more meaningful to the enterprise/server crowd. Still, it is another performance indicator with relevance and while some drives post good MB/s numbers, their IOPS scores aren’t always commensurate which this test will prove out.

Corsair Neutron XT 240GB SSD on SATA III:

Corsair Neutron XT 240GB SSD on USB 3.0 w/ Inateck FE2006:

Benchmark Results: The overall Anvil SSD Benchmark score was 5,143.24 with the Applications test setting of 46% compression with the Corsair Neutron XT running on the SATA III interface. The drive was able to get 526MB/s read and 500MB/s write with these settings. When we switched the drive over to the USB 3.0 interface through the Inateck FE2006 housing our overall score went down to 2,110.22 with 414MB/s read and 410MB/s write speeds.