Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 80ES 480GB External SSD Review

We tested the drive as it comes out of the box, factory formatted as exFAT. To test the drive we reformatted it to NTFS.

CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSDs. We are using V8.

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.

The IronKey Vault Privacy 80 ES is rated at up to 250MB/s for both reads and writes. We managed to squeeze a tiny bit more out of it when testing it. The best read performance figure we saw was 274MB/s (CrystalDiskMark 8 – default, compressed data tests, Peak Performance profile default and compressed data tests) while the best write performance came from the CrystalDiskMark 8 default profile (using compressed data) at 262MB/s. In the 4K tests, the drive averaged 27.73MB/s (QD1 T1) & 28.17MB/s (QD32 T1) for reads and 59.52MB/s (QD1 T1) & 62.54MB/s (QD32 1T) for writes.

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