Performance

A-DATA markets the flash memory modules for the Eee PC, thus we will benchmark both the S701 and the white SDHC card on a freshly installed Windows XP Professional OS with Service Pack 2 and all needed drivers on an Eee PC 4G in white.

To get the best performance, both units were formatted with NTFS instead of FAT32. While this is generally not possible for drives smaller than 64 GB, certain tools give you the option nonetheless. Using NTFS is recommended in this environment, as you may want to save files larger than 4 GB on the memory devices. It would have been nice if A-DATA could format the unit with NTFS right from the start, this saves the user some hassles, or worse the realization that his 4 GB+ file cannot be stored on the medium on the road.

The SDHC card reader properties were changed from optimization "for quick removal" to "Performance". This is easily done the following way:

• Right-click on My Computer and select Properties
• Click on the Hardware Tab
• Click on the Device Manager button
• Click on the little + next to Disk Drives
• Right-click on USB2.0 CardReader SD0 USB Device and select Properties
• Click on the Policies tab
• Click on the Optimize for performance circle
• Click on OK

NOTE: This information was found on the EeeUser forums.


We first determined the speed of the internal 4GB SSD drive on which the operating system resides. Turns out that the unit is quite speedy with read values well beyond 30 MB/s.


Taking a look at the write speeds at various file sizes using ATTO, it becomes apparent that the SSD has serious troubles with files smaller than 64 kb. This is normal for flash based drives. Beyond such small file sizes, the internal solid state drive manages around 15 MB/s write speed.

A-DATA S701 Eee PC Edition

Next we inserted the S701 8 GB USB flash drive and compared the results with the internal drive. While the USB memory performs quite well, with around 25 MB/s in read speed, it still lacks when compared to the internal SSD of the Eee PC.


Taking a look at the write performance, it becomes apparent that the S701 is no match for the internal storage of the ASUS subnotebook. With a write speed of around 5 MB/s it manages just a third of the performance of the SSD.

A-DATA SDHC Eee PC Edition

The white SDHC card does not manage to beat the internal SSD of the notebook either and only manages just above 17 MB/s in read performance. This is just about half the attained result of the SSD.


Write performance is similar to that of the S701, with just over 5 MB/s. This seems to be a limitation of the internal SDHC card reader of the Eee PC, as the A-DATA Turbo SDHC Class 6 16 GB variant manages almost 10 MB/s of writing performance.

Performance Summary