Team Group’s USB 3.1 Gen 1 Portable PD400 240GB SSD Review For Gamers

Here are the comparative overall PCMark 8 scores including storage bandwidth results. The game loading results are charted first.

The Kingston PCIe A1000 M.2 480GB SSD is the fastest drive overall, however, there isn’t a lot of practical difference between its results and the SATA or even external USB 3.1 Gen 1 SSD game loading speeds. In contrast to using any SSD, using the SSHD takes nearly twice as long to load the tested two games. A SSHD only takes advantage of repeated loading of levels or games and after 2 or 3 loads, and then it will set up more quickly, approaching SSD speeds.

SiSoft Sandra 20/20

Before we get to gaming, we want to see exactly where drive performance results differ, and there is no better tool than SiSoft’s Sandra 2020. SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an complete information & diagnostic utility in one complete package. It is able to provide all the information about your hardware, software and other devices for diagnosis and for benchmarking. In addition, Sandra is derived from a Greek name that implies “defender” or “helper” – PC’s Wonder Woman of benchmarking.

There are several versions of Sandra 2020, including a free version of Sandra Lite that anyone can download and use. It is highly recommended! SiSoft’s Sandra 2020 SP1 is the very latest version (although we are still using the August version), and we are using the full engineer suite courtesy of SiSoft. It will benchmark and analyze all of the important PC subsystems and even rank your PC as well as make recommendations for improvements.

Here are the Sandra disk benchmarking tests in a single chart summarizing the performance results of our four drives

The Kingston A1000 480 GB NVMe SSD overall performance is faster than the other two SATA III SSDs although the Vulcan SSD comes in second ahead of the Team Group L5 LTE SSD. The Team Group USB 3.1 PD400 is the slowest SSD but it is faster than the SSHD which is in last place.

AIDA64 v6.0

AIDA64 is the successor to Everest and it is an important industry tool for benchmarkers. AIDA64’s benchmark code methods are written in Assembly language, and they are extremely optimized for every popular AMD, Intel and VIA processor core variants by utilizing the appropriate instruction set extensions. We use the Engineer’s version of AIDA64 courtesy of FinalWire. AIDA64 is free to to try and use for 30 days.

We run the AIDA64 Disk Benchmark and the 4 individual READ tests for each drive, and we include the image for each test and then summarize them in a chart. These tests are incredibly detailed and there are a lot of customization options available so we run the default tests. We did not run the Read tests as they destroy all of the data on the disks being tested.

1. The Linear Read test measure the sequential performance by reading or writing all sectors without skipping any. It’s a linear view of the drives overall performance from its beginning to end.
2. The Random Read test measures the random performance by reading variable-sized data blocks at random locations on the surface of the drive and they are combination of both speed and access times as its position changes before each new operation.
3. The Access time tests are designed to measure the data access performance by reading 0.5 KB data blocks at random drive locations.
4. The Buffered Read test will measure the drive caching.

Above are the Team Group PD400 SSD‘s overall disk benchmark results followed by 4 images of AIDA64’s individualized Read tests.

Here is the summary chart comparing our five tested drives:

Again the Kingston A1000 480GB NVMe SSD is ahead of the other SATA-based SSDs which are in turn faster than the external PD400 which is much faster than the SSHD.

CrystalDiskMark 6.0.0

CrystalDiskMark is a HDD benchmark utility for your hard drive that enables you to measure sequential and random read/write speeds. Here are some key features of “CrystalDiskMark”:

• Measure sequential reads/writes speed
• Measure random 512KB, 4KB, 4KB (Queue Depth=32) reads/writes speed

Here are the PD400 240GB portable SSD results:

The FireCuda 2 TB SSHD‘s CrystalDiskMark results show it is pretty slow compared with the PD400.

Here are the Team Group 480GB L5 SSD‘s CrystalDiskMark results.

Here is the T-FORCE Vulcan 500GB SSD CrystalDiskMark results.

The Kingston A1000 480GB SSD CrystalDiskMark tests results follow.

As expected, the PCIe M.2 Kingston A1000 SSD scores highest followed by the T-FORCE Vulcan 500GB SSD, then the Team Group L5 LTE 480GB SSD, then the Team Group USB 3.1 PD400, and in distant last place, the FireCuda 2TB SSHD. The PD400 has decent Read speeds but its Write speed is quite slow.

Let’s look at our next synthetic test, HD Tune. This free standalone synthetic test we use is old and it doesn’t represent real world performance but it does test some important drive metrics and it is still used today. There is also a pay-for HD Tune Pro which is up-to-date and offers more functionality.

HD Tune

HD Tune is a hard disk utility which has the following functions and it measures the performance of:

• Transfer Rate
• Access Time
• CPU Usage
• Burst Rate
• Random Access test
• Write benchmark

Hard Disk information includes partition information, supported features, firmware version, serial number, disk capacity, buffer size, transfer mode.

• Hard Disk Health
• S.M.A.R.T. Information (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology)
• Power On Time
• Error scan
• Temperature display

Here is the Team Group PD400 240GB SSD HD Tune benchmark.

Here are the HD Tune benches summarized in a chart.

The Kingston A1000 PCIe NVMe SSD again leads our tested drives followed by the T-FORCE Vulcan 500GB SSD, the Team Group L5 LTE 480GB SSD, then the PD400, and again as the slowest is the SSHD.

Next we benchmark using AS SSD.

AS SSD

AS SSD is especially designed for Solid State Drives (SSD). This tool contains synthetic and practice tests. The synthetic tests determine the sequential and random read and write performance of the SSD without use of the operating system caches. In Seq-test the program measures how long it takes to read and write a 1 GB file.

In the 4K test, read and write performance for random 4K blocks are determined. The 4K-64-thrd test are similar to the 4K procedure except that the read and write operations on 64 threads are distributed as in the usual start of a program. In the copying test, two large ISO file folders are created, programs with many small files, and a games folder with small and large files. These three folders are copied by the OS copy command with the cache turned on. AS SSD gives an overall “score” after it runs the benchmarks.

Here is the Team Group PD400 240GB SSD AS SSD results.

The SSHD or HDD tests appear to take forever with AS SSD and they score very low compared to any SSD. The USB 3.1 PD400 is the slowest of our four tested SSDs but it is still much faster than any SSHD.

ATTO

ATTO is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices including for SSDs and HDDs. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and low level Windows interfaces to determine the physical performance of the device.

Here is the ATTO Team Group PD400 240GB SSD results:

The FireCuda 2 TB SSHD’s ATTO benchmark results are next.

The Kingston A1000 480 GB SSD ATTO Disk benchmark results are shown last.

HD Tach

HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices including for SSDs and HDDs. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and low level Windows interfaces to determine the physical performance of the device. It is no longer supported and needs to be run in compatibility mode for Windows 7.

Here is the Team Group PD400 240GB SSD HDTach results with an average read of 420.3 MB/s.

Here are the HD Tach Disk benches summarized in a chart comparing our five tested drives.

Happy Gaming!