Cooler Master Oracle Air NVMe M.2 SSD Enclosure Review

When it came to testing we used the 1TB WD Blue SN570 PCIe Gen 3 drive that Cooler Master bundled with the review drive. As the Oracle Air also supports PCIe Gen 4 drives we re-ran some of the tests using a Samsung SSD980 PRO.

Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure the theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSDs. We are using V7.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturer's RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read-and-write tests, as well as random read-and-write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.

PCIe Gen 3 SSD.

The best Sequential performance we saw from the 1TB WD Blue SN570 was 1,083MB/s for both reads and writes when the drive was tested with the default CrystalDiskMark 8 test. The fastest 4K speeds came when the drive was tested with the CrystalDiskMark 8 Peak Performance profile; 466.45MB/s for reads and 387.96MB/s using a QD of 32 and 16 threads. Much more like real life were the 48MB/s read and 82MB/s write figures from the QD1 single thread tests.

PCIe Gen 4 SSD.

Although the review drive came bundled with a PCIe Gen3 drive in the shape of a WD Blue SN570 drive, the enclosure also supports Gen4 drives so we did some retesting using a 1TB Samsung SSD980 PRO.  Switching over to the Gen4 drive saw both the ATTO and AS SSD Sequential test result figures rise from 848MB/s (reads) and 936MB/s (writes) to 1,001MB/s and 1,017MB/s for read and writes respectively using ATTO. AS SSD figures rose from 959MB/s (reads) and 915MB/s (writes) up to 1,002MB/s for reads and 1,001MB/s for writes.

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