ADATA DashDrive Air AE800 500GB Review

Anvil’s Storage Utilities

Anvil’s Storage Utilities is a free to download benchmarking utility and has the ability to test hard drives and solid state drives, but also any other form of storage medium that you can throw at it. As well as testing the drive in a variety of benchmarking tests, it also has a drive endurance test that consistently reads and writes data to the selected medium to give days, months and potentially even years of use in a shorter period of time to see how the drive copes in the longer term.

Drive Comparison

When we come to looking at the results that Anvil’s gives us, the performance figures do appear to be a little inconsistent with the other benchmarks. Whilst the read performance follows the same ~120MB/s trend, the write performance here takes a bit of a hit, dropping to 46MB/s. Obviously this result required the test to be re-run in order to see if this is a one time result, however the figures were seen each and every time I tested the drive, even on another test bench. Although these numbers would appear to make the drive look bad in this area, copying a 4.5GB file to the hard drive over USB3.0 showed speeds that were more in line to the figures shown within ATTO Disk Benchmark.