Đánh giá sandisk ultra ii crystaldiskmark năm 2024

I got this SSD to improve my system performance as my hard drive seemed as though it was beginning to fail and was moving really slow with everyday tasks, even searching for apps in the finder. Initially, the performance gain was immense. Boot times moved from over a minute (or probably over 2) to less than 8 seconds. Whatever application i opened was really swift and made my computer feel new again. The ssd also features a caching system, with a small amount of fast cache in which it stores the most frequently or recently used files.

I was unable to register the product to enable my warranty on sandisks website though, although it was purchased from Amazon, this may be of great concern to those of you who would utilise the warranty in the case of a bad product, which would be encouraged.

As for performance Its now been about 3 months since i've had the drive and yes, the performance has taken a dip, boot times are slower and the 4k random reads are slower. I tested the drive with both Crystal Disk Mark and Black Magic Disk Speed test, the results are as such:

note: write speed fluctuates a lot

Black magic disk speed test (Before Cache) : Sequential Write : 165.6 MB/s Sequential Read : 453.6 MB/s

Black magic disk speed test (After Cache) : Sequential Write : 440.9 MB/s Sequential Read : 473.5 MB/s

Crystal Disk Mark : Sequential Read: 449.8 MB/s Sequential Write: 431.3 MB/s

Previous Hard Drive:

Crystal Disk Mark:

Sequential Read: 96.65 MB/s Sequential Write: 79.15 MB/s

Black Magic Disk Speed Test :

Sequential Read: 81.4 MB/s Sequential Write: 98.3 MB/s

Conclusion

A big leap forward and a worthy upgrade from a hard drive, however due to the fall of the 4k random reads (which operating systems utilise alot, as youre usually requesting random files, not sequential), this makes me question the long term durability of this drive, may update in the future to let you know how its performance keeps up.

If you’re not an Amazon Prime member (and I am not), then chances are, you may have come across a number of good deals that somehow have a price just under the AU$39 free shipping amount. It seems this is done practically on-purpose to encourage users to browse and pad their carts with more items, perhaps those with better margins.

As it turns out, I had spotted a deal on something and it was under the free shipping threshold. Rather than pay around AU$6 for delivery, I decided that would be better spent towards an item that would bring me up to the threshold rather than on shipping alone – so I decided to pick up a USB flash drive as they’re usually pretty cheap and handy to have around.

Rather than just pick up something I already have, I decided to give the 64GB SanDisk Ultra USB Type-C Flash Drive a try. This one has the distinction of being the first USB Type-C flash drive I own, costing just shy of AU$15 which is a pretty average price. Is it any good, or is it just like most other SanDisk Ultra products?

The Item

The drive arrives in the rather plain grey-background package with the “store MORE. FAST” tagline. It advertises USB 3.1 Gen 1 connectivity, which is practically the same as USB 3.0. A read speed of up to 150MB/s is advertised, but no write speed is indicated. The USB-C interface makes it suitable for Android and iPad Pro usage.

It is backed by a 5-year warranty and apparently the full-length movie in under 30 seconds claim is made based on a 1.2GB MPEG-4 video file, implying a transfer rate of >40MB/s. It does include RescuePRO Deluxe 1-year license inside the packet and is Made in China.

The drive itself is packaged inside a plastic bubble, closed with thin clear plastic film.

The drive has a translucent plastic body with a retracting design to protect the USB-C connector. With the light shining in fron the side, it seems the whole device consists of a single system-in-package with the connector soldered onto the edge.

The logo is printed on top and the loop at the rear can attach to a lanyard or keyring.

The underside of the drive has the capacity, model, serial number and approvals printed on it. A knurled plastic slider is used to extend the drive out of the shell.

As expected, this ends in the reversible USB-C connector which can be attached to a regular PC or laptop with USB-C port, or to the USB-C OTG ports of mobile devices for file transfer.

Plugging In

Being a USB-C drive, I was surprised at how little insertion force is necessary to plug in the connection. The connector itself is both a blessing and a curse, as we are in this awkward transition phase where we are tipping towards USB-C but many devices are still legacy and have only USB-A front ports available, or have a USB-C which is used with a much more important peripheral (e.g. PD charger, docking station).

As a result, this time around, I had to test this one using the onboard USB-C ports on my Lenovo Legion 5 running Windows 11. A red LED is present and shines out of the side of the body. It seemingly activates during writes.

The drive, as provided, has a free space of 61,464,379,392 bytes and a total partition capacity of 61,509,107,712 bytes. This is notably short of the 64GB on the package.

Included on the drive is the SanDisk Memory Zone app for Android and a quick start guide. This is not something I decided to test.

The drive has a VID of 0781 and PID of 55A4. The partitioning is MBR with a partition format of FAT32 to maximise compatibility. The capacity of the device in total is just 61,524,148,224 bytes or about 3.9% shy of 64GB or 10.5% shy of 64GiB. This is probably the smallest 64GB device I have come across.

Performance Testing

Testing was performed with the usual benchmarks as part of the commissioning process. Performance may vary depending on your test platform and test conditions.

HDTune Pro

Out of the box with nothing written, the drive seems to peak at 164.6MB/s with an average of 116MB/s sequential read. This is not very representative of actual usage, however.

With the drive filled, it seems to read at a maximum of 166.2MB/s for about 11GB and then falls back to around 75MB/s for the remainder. The drive averages 89.6MB/s and the reason for this appears to be related to thermal throttling although I did not attempt to confirm.

Write speeds which are arguably more important are horrible. While it did peak at 58.4MB/s, the drive fell below 20MB/s by the time 3GB have been written. After this, the drive tried its hardest to maintain its head above 10MB/s like some of the older SanDisk Ultra microSD cards. It just feels artificially throttled and infuriatingly slow for a drive marketed as a USB 3.1 product.

With regards to IOPs, read performance peaked at about 1827IOPS. Write IOPS topped out at 158IOPS and long peak latencies were suffered at 1MB accesses of over 3s.

Extra tests were also performed although are not highly relevant.

CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark 8 run at default settings seem to show decent read figures, but relatively limited write performance despite the small file. This may just be because of the temperature of drive causing thermal throttling.

Running the peak performance + mix profile shows slightly higher numbers with a healthier write speed. However, it still doesn’t reach the implied 40MB/s by the package. The random access time seems quite long.

A real world performance + mix profile shows fairly similar numbers for throughput, but the random access times are shorter. Perhaps there are some anomalies in the testing, but either way, it is rather underwhelming performance.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

Testing with ATTO did not give consistent performance. On the left, it seems the drive was somewhat thermally throttled so the read speeds capped out close to 75MB/s. On the right, giving the drive some breathing time, it was able to go faster, but by the end of the benchmark, it was starting to slow down again. Peak performance appears around 512KB accesses – I wonder if this device has larger blocks or if this is a side-effect of the memory (assuming it is QLC).

H2testW

A full drive fill and verify did not reveal any integrity errors, but averaged 72MB/s read and 12MB/s write.

Conclusion

Aside from being equipped with a USB-C connector and being priced reasonably, the SanDisk Ultra USB-C Flash Drive has little to commend it. It is predictably slow as with most SanDisk Ultra products, with write speeds that are hardly worthy of a USB 3.1 Gen 1 connection. The design, while compact and neatly retractable, features a plastic body which seems to trap in enough heat that the drive’s performance appears to be affected by thermal throttling even on read-only benchmarks. Long write IOPS latency peaks and the currently “awkward” non-universality of USB-C connections add to the disadvantages.