Portable external SSD face-off: ADATA SD700 vs. Samsung T3
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Test Setup, PCMark 8 and Timing Test
Test Setup
The drives will be tested on our updated storage testbed using the Windows 10 operating system, which has the following specifications:
- Intel Core i7-4770K (3.5GHz)
- ASUS Z97-Deluxe/USB 3.1 (Intel Z97 chipset)
- 2 x 4GB DDR3-1600 memory
- MSI GeForce 8600 GTS
- Windows 10 Pro
We have also revised our benchmarks and the list used are as follows:
- AS-SSD benchmark 1.8.5636.36856
- CrystalDiskMark 5.0.2
- PCMark 8 (Storage suite)
To keep things fair, we will be testing the ADATA SD700 and Samsung T3 with equivalent capacities. We are testing the 500/512GB variants. Because of NAND parallelism, capacity plays a big role in determining drive performance. Generally speaking, higher capacity drives tend to perform better because the NAND controller has more memory chips to read and write to.
PCMark 8
On PCMark 8, the two drives recorded very comparable scores, with the Samsung T3 nudging slightly ahead with a score of 4946 - just a mere 19 points more. If we look at the average speed recorded, the T3 managed 229MB/s, which was about 8.5% more than the SD700’s 211.24MB/s. What this all means is that, on PCMark 8 at least, the two drives are very closely matched.
Timing Test
In our real world timing test, the results were very different from PCMark 8. While I expected the two drives to post comparable timings, the fact was that the ADATA SD700 was significantly quicker, completing the copying task in just 62 seconds - a good 12 seconds ahead of the Samsung T3.
