Seagate Seven External USB 3.0 Drive Review

ATTO Disk Benchmark and CrystalDiskMark

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: ATTO showed the Seagate Seven 500GB Portable External Drive maxing out at 112 MB/s read and 112 MB/s write in the standard overlapped I/O benchmarkon the 64KB block size when connected to the ASUS Z97-A motherboard with the USB 3.0 interface.

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 (as noted) for the last listed benchmark score. This can skew some results in favor of controllers that also do not support NCQ.

Benchmark Results: The Seagate Seven 500GB drive topped out at 111.8 MB/s read and 109.4 MB/s write on the CrystalDiskMark sequential file transfer test with default settings.