Storage Interfaces

Storage Performance

Drive testing is the area where we can easily compare how a motherboard performs compared to another, while also eliminating things that can give the wrong impression, such as differences in CPU or memory used. No matter what your configuration is, you should see results that are nearly identical no matter the board, right? WRONG. This is the one place (well, other than audio) where a board maker's board design really shows its strength or weakness. Of course, there are some inherent platform differences in performance that cannot be ignored; Intel's X299 has much lower drive performance overall compared to other platforms, a strange oddity I discovered to apparently hold true no matter which board for that platform you choose. It might be something as simple as the added PCIe complexity adding a bit of latency or some other such factor, yet no matter what the cause, the difference is clearly there. If drive performance is something that is really important to you, you should be looking at Z370 products right now, NOT X299. At times, it seems that Intel X299 HEDT boards offer 10% less performance over most drive interfaces unless an external controller (usually provided by ASMedia) is used to drive the added ports. Below are some results for you to see these differences by, and hopefully, these will help you decide which platform is truly right for you.

HDTune Pro (SATA 6Gb/s)

HDTune Pro (USB3.0 Front Panel)

HDTune Pro (USB 3.1 Type-C)

HDTune Pro (NVME M.2)