VisionTek mSATA Mini USB 3.0 SSD Enclosure Review

Drive Performance – ATTO and CrystalDiskMark

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. We ran this benchmark with the default settings, so you can download it and easily run a speed test on your drive at home to see where you are at with what you already own.

VisionTek mSATA mini Enclosure w/ Kingston SMS200S3 120GB SSD:

Benchmark Results: CrystalDiskMark showed that the Kingston 120GB SATA III 6.0Gb/s mSATA drive was getting sequential read and write speeds of 250 and 160 MB/s, which isn’t bad at all. When Joe reviewed this model mSATA SSD on a motherboard with an mSATA slot on it he was getting around 270MB/s read and 160MB/s write, so our numbers are just slightly lower than that. We expected somewhat lower performance due to the fact there is increased latency from the controller that coverts the mSATA drive over to USB 3.0.

ATTO v2.47:

ATTO is one of the oldest drive benchmarks still being used today and is still very relevant.. 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 benchmark test was performed with the default runs of 0.5kb through 8192kb transfer sizes with the total length being 256mb.

VisionTek mSATA mini Enclosure w/ Kingston SMS200S3 120GB SSD:

Benchmark Results: ATTO showed that we were hitting 378MB/s read and 310MB/s write on the sequential tests with this setup. These are pretty impressive speeds and makes it super fast. The SanDisk Extreme Pro 128GB USB 3.0 Flash drive costs $145 and got 265MB/s read and 230MB/s write when we tested it out a couple months ago in a review. The VisionTek mSATA mini Enclosure is bigger and bulkier than your standard Flash Drive, but it is clear that it has the potential for much higher performance.