Kingston Class 10 UHS-I SDXC 256GB and MicroSD 128GB Review
Kingston 256GB Class 10 UHS-I SDXC Performance
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3 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.
Benchmark Results: On our desktop PC that uses an ASUS Z97-A motherboard with Windows 8.1 along with ASUS USB 3.0 Boost drivers we found solid performance numbers with the latest UAS Protocol (UASP) drivers installed. CrystalDiskMark showed that we topped out at 96.84MB/s sequential read and around 68.06MB/s sequential write on the Kingston 256GB Class 10 UHS-I SDXC memory card. The sequential speeds are pretty impressive as is the 512K read speed. The 4K Random read and write speeds aren’t that good, but they aren’t really important as this isn’t a boot or application drive in a traditional PC.
ATTO v2.47
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.
Benchmark Results: On ATTO with USAP installed we were able to get up to 98MB/s read and 52MB/s write, which shows the cards rated speeds of 90MB/s read and 45MB/s write are indeed conservative!
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. Theres a relatively new benchmark called Anvil Storage Utilities that is in beta but close to production. Its 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 dont do a lot of IOPS testing because frankly a lot of users cant 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 arent always commensurate which this test will prove out.
Benchmark Results: We got around 92.5MB/s sequential read and 74.6MB/s sequential write on the sequential 4MB file size tests on Anvil’s Storage Utilities benchmark using 46% compression to simulate applications. These are very solid numbers for an SDHC/SDXC memory card!