Cavalry Storage Pelican 64GB External SSD Review

Read Bandwidth

For this benchmark, HDTach was used. It shows the potential read speed which you are likely to experience with these hard drives. The long test was run to give a slightly more accurate picture.

We don’t put much stock in Burst speed readings and this goes double for SSD based hard drive. The main reason we include it is to show what under perfect conditions a given drive is capable of; but the more important number is the Average Speed number. This number will tell you what to expect from a given drive in normal, day to day operations. The higher the average the faster your entire system will seem.


While the SATA speeds are not terrible, we were expecting a lot more from the JM602b controller. If we were to speculate we would say the difference between the Pelican and WARP v2 is more firmware based than hardware, though it may also be due to the slightly inferior MLC flash chips used in the Pelican. On the positive side these numbers are better than the quoted specifications. It’s always nice when the manufacturer is conservative in their estimates.

It will be interesting to see if the other specifications are similarly under valued. Also on the positive side; the read speeds in USB mode are awfully darn good and will give just about any USB thumb-drive a run for its money!

Write Performance

For this benchmark HD Tune Pro was used. To run the write benchmark on a drive, you must first remove all partitions from that drive and then and only then will it allow you to run this test. Unlike some other benchmarking utlities the HD Tune Pro writes across the full area of the drive, thus it easily shows any weakness a drive may have.

While most OS drives spend most of their times reading and not writing, the write speed of the drive does have a big impact on the stutter issue and how fast the drive feels.


Ouch, these numbers are abysmal for a modern SSD; heck they are low enough that they are approaching HDD speeds. Compounding this is the fact that the Pelican had many, many dips all of which were under 15MB/s with the worst being a mere 11.5MB/s. To say this is not good is truly an understatement of monumental proportions!

Once again the USB performance stats come to the rescue; though once again with dips that are extremely low. Maybe it is because we have such low expectations of USB “performance” that these numbers can be considered decent…maybe its because most USB thumb-drives are (dare we say it) built for ease of use and not speed? Either way, we would rather use this drive as a USB device than rely on it for an OS drive. Let’s see if this trend continues throughout the rest of the tests.