Pretec SDHC 32GB 433x Media Card Review

AIDA64 Extreme Edition is a streamlined Windows diagnostic and benchmarking software for home users. AIDA64 Extreme Edition provides a wide range of features to assist in overclocking, hardware error diagnosis, stress testing, and sensor monitoring. It has unique capabilities to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives. AIDA64 is compatible with all current 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft Windows operating systems, including Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

In AIDA64, we found the card to come close to its advertised read speeds, with a consistent read speed of around 58MB/s through the entire capacity spectrum. Reading at random, naturally gave slightly higher results at 60.5MB/s.

Anvil’s Storage Utilities is a new benchmarking utility that we have started using here at eTeknix, its completely free to download and has the ability to test mainly 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. Using the drive endurance test, we put the card through a continuous cycle of read and write operations filling the card to the brim with test data each time and then reading it back. By doing this we can speed up the long term test as we don’t want to spend a year for example testing one product.

As you can see from the results above, in just over six hours, just over 2.6TB of data was written to the card and then read back off and deleted and accounts for 100 complete cycles end-to-end being performed. Whilst this looks extreme, if the card is capable of handling this large amount of data in such a short time with no problems, then this would show that spaced out into a real world usage scenario, the chances of the card having a drop in performance or operation is lower.