Cavalry Storage Pelican 64GB External SSD Review

XP Start Up

When it comes to hard drive performance there is one area that even the most oblivious user notices: how long it takes to load the Operating System. For our tests the clock starts as soon as the system “beeps!” and stops when our Anti-Virus splash screen disappears. While all the other tests were run with a streamlined XP image this particular image is the test bed's “day to day” OS and it has accumulated a lot of crud over the months from installs and removals. We chose the Anti-Virus splash screen as our finish line as it is the last program to be loaded on start up.


While not terrible, 49 seconds for an SSD is on the low side. It appears that this drive's strengths are in its storage capabilities, and its USB connectivity….not its SATA abilities. Let’s see if the other real world tests can shed some more light on this for us. As with the IOMeter tests we did not test via USB as that would be a highly unusual setup…and one where you know going into it that speed would not be all that high.

ADOBE CS3 LOAD TIME

Photoshop is a notoriously slow loading program under the best of circumstances, but when you add in a bunch of extra brushes and the such you get a really great torture test which can bring even the best of the best to their knees. Let’s see how our review unit fared in the Adobe crucible!


As with XP load times, the Pelican is not a power house performer by any stretch. The combination of small and large files needed to be loaded in a time sensitive manner really did put a lot of stress on this underpowered controller and it shows. Once again no USB testing was done as that would be an unrealistic (i.e. NOT real world) situation for this drive to encounter.