VisionTek 120GB USB 3.0 Pocket SSD Drive Review

By Nathan Kirsch January 28, 2015

CrystalDiskMark & ASSSD

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3 x64 Benchmark:

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.

VisionTek 120GB USB Pocket SSD on USB 3.0:

Benchmark Results: The VisionTek USB Pocket SSD 120GB drive hit 208.7MB/s read and 154.1MB/s write on the sequential test when we ran the drive on the CrystalDiskMark storage test with the default settings (incompressible data). When we ran the 000 (0 Fill) test (compressible data) we found that the sequential read/write performance of the drive improved to 250MB/s read and 410.9MB/s write. The 4K performance was found to be 12-14MB/s read and 40MB/s write.

AS-SSD (1.7.4739.38088) Benchmark:

We have been running the AS-SSD Benchmark app for over some time now and found that it gives a broad result set. The programmer has worked very hard on this software and continues to make updates often so if you use it, show him some love and send him a donation. There are now three tests that are found within the tool and well show the results from all three of them.

VisionTek 120GB USB Pocket SSD on USB 3.0:

Benchmark Results: In AS SSD we found the VisionTek USB Pocket SSD 120GB drive was reaching 202MB/s read and 144MB/s in the sequential write test. With all the scores added up we got an overall score of 385 points.

Benchmark Results: The AS SSD ISO copy test places two 500MB files in a folder on the drive and then times how long it takes to copy the folder to another location on the same drive. The result is reported in both MBps and time taken. The VisionTek USB Pocket SSD completed the task in 12.87 seconds and averaged 83.48 MB/s. This is a pretty good real world test that gauges a drive to do read and write operations simultaneously.

Benchmark Results: For this benchmark chart you would ideally want to see a straight line as you dont want any compression performance loss as the test goes from 0% compressible to 100% compressible data during the benchmark test period. The SF-2281 controller is known to do well with on-the-fly compression and loves compressible data. The results shown above show that the VisionTek USB Pocket SSD didn’t do that hot with incompressible data (0%) although the performance greatly improves as the data became more compressible.