Intel Compute Stick STK1AW32SC Review with Cherry Trail

MicroSD and eMMC Storage Drive Speed Tests

No review is complete without a look at drive performance!

The Intel PPSTK1AW32SC uses a SanDisk DF4032 32GB eMMC storage drive and we wanted to take a quick look at the performance of this embedded device.

A quick run of CrystalDiskMark v5.0.1 showed the sequential read speed at 173 MB/s and the write speed at 103 MB/s! The Random 4K read speed was 11.8 MB/s and the 4K random write speed was 14.7 MB/s.

Taking a look at another storage benchmark called ATTO, we find that the SSD reaching speeds of up to 173 MB/s read and 100 MB/s write. Not bad performance numbers and this is about what we expected the performance to be around.

To try out the side microSD slot we used a SanDisk Extreme microSDXC UHS-I 64GB memory card that is capable of 80MB/s read speeds and roughly 50MB/s write speeds.

The SanDisk Extreme microSDXC UHS-I 64GB memory card topped out at 93 MB/s on the read speed and 51 MB/s on the write speed, which is over its rated speeds! Much better than the original version that topped out at just 24 MB/s read/write due to design limitations.

Real world file transfers from a microSD card to the Windows 10 Home 32-bit desktop shows that we were getting roughly 20MB/s when moving a file from the SanDisk microSD card to the eMMC storage drive. It hit about 40MB/s for a split second, but settled down to 20 MB/s for much of the remainder of the folder transfer.

Let’s move on and take a look at the wireless performance of the Intel Compute Stick!