Cavalry Storage Pelican 64GB External SSD Review

Crystal DiskMark

Crystal DiskMark is designed to quickly test the performance of your hard drives. Currently, the program allows to measure sequential and random read/write speeds; and allows you to set the number of tests iterations to run. We left the number of tests at 5. When all 5 tests for a given section were run Crystal DiskMark then averages out all 5 numbers to give a result for that section.

Read


While the SATA numbers are once again a little on the anemic side of things, the USB numbers are decent. It’s funny that even over such an inferior link like USB that the Pelican stomps "high performance" HDDs in two of the three tests (and most importantly in the small but tough 4k test!).

Write


In the write end of things, well the outlook is not as rosy as it was for the read results as these numbers are low. We expect the USB numbers to be low and while they are relatively low they are very, very good for USB speeds. As is becoming extremely obvious (and while we hate to kick an already dead horse…again….and again….and again) the SATA numbers are abysmal. While the spindle based drives in our chart can be considered “best of breed” right now in HDD tech…any SSD worthy of the name should NOT be bested as badly as this guy is. Heck, even the 640GB drive which is 10 times bigger yet costs only half as much beats it in 2 out of 3 tests (and the third is so close as to be a frickin’ draw). If Cavalry Storage wants to use terms like “cutting edge” (or even “internal/external storage”)….they better start working on the firmware…or sourcing out for better parts as this iteration is not cutting edge anything when it comes to SATA SSDs.