By David Ramsey

Manufacturer: MyDigitalDiscount.com
Product Name: MyDigitalSSD 1TB BOOST USB 3.1 SuperSpeed Plus UASP Portable SSD Solid State Drive
Part Number: MDMSR-BST-1TB-RD (Red) MDMSR-BST-1TB-BK (Black)
UPC: 728028423914
Price As Tested: $262.12 (MyDigitalDiscount | Amazon)

Full Disclosure: Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. provided the product sample used in this article.

MyDigitalSSD is a subbrand of MyDigitalDiscounts, and they’ve made their mark competing on price-performance. Today Benchmark Reviews has their new entry in the growing field of external, USB-connected solid state drives, the MyDigitalSSD BOOST 1TB external drive. Comprising two TLC SATA III 512GB SSDs in a RAID 0 internal array, the BOOST 1TB drive promises performance that exceeds that of SSDs connected to a SATA port, with maximum read and write speeds of 830MB/s and 730MB/s, respectively…but these speeds are only achievable if your computer has a USB Type C SuperSpeed+ port.

While SSDs are rapidly becoming the standard for newer desktop and laptop computers, portable USB-powered external drives have continued to use the older mechanical spinning-platter technology. There’s good reason for this: the 2.5″ drive mechanisms used in these devices are both inexpensive and capacious. What they are not, however, is “fast” or “appropriate for new mobile technology.”

Capacity	1TB
Interface	USB 3.1 SSP with UASP
Form Factor	Custom, 74mm x 58mm x 10.5mm
NAND	TLC NAND
Max seq. read	830MB/s (ATTO)
Max seq. write	730MB/s (ATTO)
Dimensions	98mm x 80mm x 17mm
Max. Transfer Rate	USB 3.1 SuperSpeed+: 10Gbps
Warranty	3 years

No matter how fast your processor, memory, or video card is, your computer will still be limited by its slowest component: the hard disk. While hard disk speed has improved tremendously since the “early days”, with large caches and 10,000RPM spindle speeds, even the fastest hard disk’s performance is glacial compared to the rest of the computer. The situation only gets worse with modern pre-emptive multitasking operating systems, where dozens of threads are running simultaneously and competing for your disk’s limited response time and bandwidth.

Consider: the average time to move a high-performance hard disk’s read/write head to a new track will be less than 10ms, which seems pretty fast. But your CPU is galloping along at billions of cycles per second, and will spend a significant amount of its time just waiting for the hard disk to fulfill its last request. Hard disk performance has plateaued in the last few years, running up against the physical limitations of spindle speeds, magnetic media density, and head servomotor performance. At the end of the day, disks are limited by the fact that they’re comprised of physical, moving parts.

With no moving parts, Solid State Drive technology removes this bottleneck. The difference an SSD makes to operational response times and program speeds is dramatic: while a faster video card makes your games faster, and a faster processor makes compute-bound tasks faster, Solid State Drive technology makes your entire system faster, improving initial response times by more than 450x (45,000%) for applications and Operating System software, when compared to their mechanical HDD counterparts. The biggest mistake PC hardware enthusiasts make with regard to SSD technology is grading them based on bandwidth speed alone. File transfer speeds are important, but only so long as the operational I/O performance can sustain that bandwidth under load.

As we’ve explained in our SSD Benchmark Tests: SATA IDE vs AHCI Mode guide, Solid State Drive performance revolves around two dynamics: bandwidth speed (MB/s) and operational performance I/O per second (IOPS). These two metrics work together, but one may be more important than the other. Consider this analogy: bandwidth determines how much cargo a ship can transport in one voyage, and operational IOPS performance is how fast that ship moves. By understanding this and applying it to SSD storage, there is a clear importance set on each variable depending on the task at hand.

For casual users, especially those with laptop or desktop computers that have been upgraded to use an SSD, the naturally quick response time is enough to automatically improve the user experience. Bandwidth speed is important, but only to the extent that operational performance meets the minimum needs of the system. If an SSD has a very high bandwidth speed but a low operational performance, it will take longer to load applications and boot the computer into Windows than if the SSD offered a higher IOPS performance.

The MyDigitalSSD BOOST 1TB comes packaged as a svelte red aluminum box, with a silk-screened legend on the front being the only label or lettering of any kind.

The case is plain, although details like the nicely chamfered edges do lend an air of quality:

Although the BOOST is smaller than most 2.5″ external hard drives, it’s still much larger than the tiny Samsung T3 external SSD.

The rear of the case sports a USB-C Micro B connector, and two holes that show white activity LEDs when the drive is being accessed. Although there are two activity lights, they blink in sync and don’t appear to indicate separate operations.

There is no documentation or utility software, but there are two USB cables: a standard USB 3 Type A cable, as well as a USB 3 Type C cable for those of you with recent Macbooks or HP Spectres. According to MyDigitalDiscount, the drive supports the full 10Gb/s throughput of the USB C 3.1 specification. This gives this drive an advantage– on paper, anyway– over Samsung’s T3 drive, which is limited to 5Gb/s.

Opening the drive reveals the two Samsung P851 mSATA 512GB SSDs.

The ASMedia 1352R controller is specifically designed to connect two mSATA SSDs in RAID 0, and handle data transfer through a USB 3.1 Superspeed+ port. If you’re wondering why mSATA SSDs are used instead of PCI-E SSDs, well, not only would two PCI-E SSDs be more expensive, but they’d overwhelm the 10Gb/s capacity of the USB connection.

So far, the hardware looks pretty impressive. Let’s see how it performs in the next section.

When we test storage devices, the two main metrics to consider are access time and transfer rate. Simply put, access time is the time is takes the storage device to start delivering data once the request has been received, while transfer rate is how fast (megabytes per second) the data comes once the transfer operation begins. With a hard disk, data transfer cannot begin until the disk’s head servo physically moves the read/write head to the correct track, and the rotation of the disk brings the designated sector under the head. Although modern servos are very fast, in the best case you’re still looking at several milliseconds to do this, while an SSD’s access time is always under a millisecond. The disadvantage is even worse if the data isn’t all in a contiguous space on the disk, since the head will have to be repositioned on the fly, leading to more delays.

Early consumer SSDs actually had slower transfer rates than the best hard disks, although their instantaneous access times more than made up for it. The zenith of consumer hard disk performance was probably reached in 2012 with the release of the Western Digital Velociraptor 1 terabyte disk. Spinning at 10,000RPM, this disk could under ideal circumstances (i.e. a synthetic bandwidth test) reach a sequential transfer rate of over 230MB/s. Keep this figure in mind as you read this review.

Early on in our SSD coverage, Benchmark Reviews published an article which detailed Solid State Drive Benchmark Performance Testing. The research and discussion that went into producing that article changed the way we now test SSD products. Our previous perceptions of this technology were lost on one particular difference: the wear leveling algorithm that makes data a moving target. Without conclusive linear bandwidth testing or some other method of total-capacity testing, our previous performance results were rough estimates at best.

Our test results were obtained after each SSD had been prepared using DISKPART or Sanitary Erase tools. As a word of caution, applications such as these offer immediate but temporary restoration of original ‘pristine’ performance levels. In our tests, we discovered that the maximum performance results (charted) would decay as subsequent tests were performed. SSDs attached to TRIM enabled Operating Systems will benefit from continuously refreshed performance, whereas older O/S’s will require a garbage collection (GC) tool to avoid ‘dirty NAND’ performance degradation.

It’s critically important to understand that no software for the Microsoft Windows platform can accurately measure SSD performance in a comparable fashion. Synthetic benchmark tools such as ATTO Disk Benchmark and Iometer are helpful indicators, but should not be considered the ultimate determining factor. That factor should be measured in actual user experience of real-world applications. Benchmark Reviews includes both bandwidth benchmarks and application speed tests to present a conclusive measurement of product performance.

Motherboard: MSI Z170A GAMING M7 Socket LGA 1151
Processor: 4.0 GHz Intel Core i7-6700K Skylake CPU
System Memory: 16GB DDR4 2133MHz
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro

The following storage hardware has been used in our benchmark performance testing, and may be included in portions of this article:

AS SSD Benchmark 1.6.4067.34354: Multi-purpose speed and operational performance test
ATTO Disk Benchmark 2.46: Spot-tests static file size chunks for basic I/O bandwidth
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1a by Crystal Dew World: Sequential speed benchmark spot-tests various file size chunks
Iometer 1.1.0 (built 08-Nov-2010) by Intel Corporation: Tests IOPS performance and I/O response time
Finalwire AIDA64: Disk Benchmark component tests linear read and write bandwidth speeds
Futuremark PCMark Vantage: HDD Benchmark Suite tests real-world drive performance

This article utilizes benchmark software tools to produce operational IOPS performance and bandwidth speed results. Each test was conducted in a specific fashion, and repeated for all products. These test results are not comparable to any other benchmark application, neither on this website or another, regardless of similar IOPS or MB/s terminology in the scores. The test results in this project are only intended to be compared to the other test results conducted in identical fashion for this article.

Testing Note on USB 3 ports: When USB 3.0 debuted in 2010, its 5 gigabits per second (5Gb/s) transfer rate was over 10 times faster than USB 2.0’s 480Mb/s. Since then, the USB 3.0 standard has been extended with the USB 3.1 and Type C connector enhancements. To make things even more confusing, there’s USB 3.1 Gen 1 (still at 5Gb/s) and USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10Gb/s).

Without going into too much detail, here are the things to keep in mind:

USB 3 on a standard USB port (with the blue plastic connector) will always be limited to 5Gb/s
A USB C port, the small reversible-connector port first seen on Apple’s Macbook and now spreading to notebooks and desktops in the PC world, may be either USB 3.1 Gen 1 (5Gb/s) or USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10Gb/s)
There is no way to visually distinguish a Gen 1 port from a Gen 2 port; the performance depends on the chipset driving the port. However, computers that implement Gen 2 ports will typically label the port with the official specification of “USB SuperSpeed+”.

Since few computers at the time of this review support the SuperSpeed+ interface and protocol, we’ll be testing the drive both with a SuperSpeed+ port at 10Gb/s as well as a standard USB 3 port at 5Gb/s. In the accompanying bar charts, the benchmarks run on the 10Gb/s port will be flagged with “(10G)”.

Alex Schepeljanski of Alex Intelligent Software develops the free AS SSD Benchmark utility for testing storage devices. The AS SSD Benchmark tests sequential read and write speeds, input/output operational performance, and response times.

AS-SSD Benchmark uses compressed data, so sequential file transfer speeds may be reported lower than with other tools using uncompressed data. For this reason, we will concentrate on the operational IOPS performance in this section.

Beginning with sequential transfer performance, the MyDigitalDiscount BOOST 1TB portable solid state drive produced 431MB/s for sequential reads and 423MB/s for sequential writes. The 4K-64 thread test we concentrate on in this benchmark produced only 87MB/s reads and 157MB/s writes.

MyDigitalSSD BOOST 1TB (5Gb/s)

At 10Gb/s, the drive’s performance improves in some measures, but declines dramatically in others. For example, not the massive drop in sequential read performance, and the massive increase in sequential write performance:

The chart below summarizes AS-SSD 64-thread 4KB IOPS performance results among a variety of enthusiast-level SSDs. The MDMSR-BST-1TB-RD returns a very low score relative to the internal SSDs that comprise the bulk of the chart, but does manage to edge ahead of the Samsung T3 when connected to a 5Gb/s USB port; oddly, the performance drops dramatically when the drive is connected to a SuperSpeed+ port.

In the next section, Benchmark Reviews tests transfer rates using ATTO Disk Benchmark.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark program is free, and offers a comprehensive set of test variables to work with. In terms of disk performance, it measures interface transfer rates at various intervals for a user-specified length and then reports read and write speeds for these spot-tests. There are some minor improvements made to the 2.46 version of the program that allow for test lengths up to 2GB, but all of our benchmarks are conducted with 256MB total length. ATTO Disk Benchmark requires that an active partition be set on the drive being tested. Please consider the results displayed by this benchmark to be basic bandwidth speed performance indicators.

1TB MyDigitalSSD BOOST Benchmark Results (5Gb/s)

At 5Gb/s, the BOOST’s 458MB/s reads and 455MB/s writes are impressive for a USB device, but still below any internal drive. However, connecting the drive to a SuperSpeed+ port increases performance to 687MB/s reads and 664MB/s writes, faster than any internal SATA drive that Benchmark Reviews has ever tested. In fact, it would be impossible for an internal SATA drive to achieve these speeds due to the limitations of the SATA 6G interface.

On this benchmark, the BOOST returns the best performance we’ve ever seen from a non-PCIE drive:

In the next section, Benchmark Reviews tests sequential performance using the CrystalDiskMark 3.0 software tool…

CrystalDiskMark 3.0 is a file transfer and operational bandwidth benchmark tool from Crystal Dew World that offers performance transfer speed results using sequential, 512KB random, and 4KB random samples. For our test results chart below, the 4KB 32-Queue Depth read and write performance was measured using a 1000MB space. CrystalDiskMark requires that an active partition be set on the drive being tested, and all drives are formatted with NTFS on the Intel P67 chipset configured to use AHCI-mode. Benchmark Reviews uses CrystalDiskMark to illustrate operational IOPS performance with multiple threads. In addition to our other tests, this benchmark allows us to determine operational bandwidth under heavy load.

CrystalDiskMark uses compressed data, so sequential file transfer speeds are reported lower than with other tools using uncompressed data. For this reason, we will concentrate on the operational IOPS performance in this section.

CrystalDiskMark 3.0 reports sequential speeds reaching 421.5MB/s reads and 437.3 MB/s writes.

1TB MyDigitalDiscount BOOST SSD CrystalDiskMarkResults (5Gb/s)

However, connected to a USB 3.1 Gen 2 port, the performance picture changes dramatically, with massive increases in sequential read and write speeds and equally massive drops in the 4K random transfer speeds:

1TB MyDigitalDiscount BOOST SSD CrystalDiskMarkResults (10Gb/s)

The chart below summarizes 4K random transfer speeds with a command queue depth of 32.

In the next section, we continue our testing using Iometer to measure input/output performance…

Iometer is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool for single and clustered systems. Iometer does for a computer’s I/O subsystem what a dynamometer does for an engine: it measures performance under a controlled load. Iometer was originally developed by the Intel Corporation and formerly known as “Galileo”. Intel has discontinued work on Iometer, and has gifted it to the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL). There is currently a new version of Iometer in beta form, which adds several new test dimensions for SSDs.

Iometer is both a workload generator (that is, it performs I/O operations in order to stress the system) and a measurement tool (that is, it examines and records the performance of its I/O operations and their impact on the system). It can be configured to emulate the disk or network I/O load of any program or benchmark, or can be used to generate entirely synthetic I/O loads. It can generate and measure loads on single or multiple (networked) systems.

To measure random I/O response time as well as total I/O’s per second, Iometer is set to use 4KB file size chunks over a 100% random sequential distribution at a queue depth of 32 outstanding I/O’s per target. The tests are given a 50% read and 50% write distribution. While this pattern may not match traditional ‘server’ or ‘workstation’ profiles, it illustrates a single point of reference relative to our product field.

All of our SSD tests used Iometer 1.1.0 (build 08-Nov-2010) by Intel Corporation to measure IOPS performance. Iometer is configured to use 32 outstanding I/O’s per target and random 50/50 read/write distribution configuration: 4KB 100 Random 50-50 Read and Write.icf. The chart below illustrates combined random read and write IOPS over a 120-second Iometer test phase, where highest I/O total is preferred. Again, connecting the drive to a 10Gb/s port results in slower performance than when the drive is connected to a 5Gb/s port, although even that number is better than the one returned by the Samsung T3.

The results here, while lower than most internal drives, are far better than those turned in by the Samsung T3.

In our next section, we test linear read and write bandwidth performance and compare the speed of MyDigitalDiscount’s external SSD against several other top storage products using the AIDA64 Disk Benchmark.

Many enthusiasts are familiar with the Finalwire AIDA64 benchmark suite, but very few are aware of the Disk Benchmark tool available inside the program. The AIDA64 Disk Benchmark performs linear read and write bandwidth tests on each drive, and can be configured to use file chunk sizes up to 1MB (which speeds up testing and minimizes jitter in the waveform). Because of the full sector-by-sector nature of linear testing, Benchmark Reviews endorses this method for testing SSD products, as detailed in our Solid State Drive Benchmark Performance Testing article. One of the advantages SSDs have over traditional spinning-platter hard disks is much more consistent bandwidth: hard disk bandwidth drops off as the capacity draws linear read/write speed down into the inner-portion of the disk platter. AIDA64 Disk Benchmark does not require a partition to be present for testing, so all of our benchmarks are completed prior to drive formatting.

Linear disk benchmarks are superior bandwidth speed tools because they scan from the first physical sector to the last. A side affect of many linear write-performance test tools is that the data is erased as it writes to every sector on the drive. Normally this isn’t an issue, but it has been shown that partition table alignment will occasionally play a role in overall SSD performance (HDDs don’t suffer this problem).

At 10Gb/s, we see the massive increase we’re expecting to see in this sequential data transfer benchmark: the average read speed has increased from 400.7MB/s to 628.8MB/s:

We run the AIDA64 linear read and write tests with a 1M block size. Charted above, read performance on the BOOST 1RB external SSD returned average speeds of 400.7MB/s.

AIDA64 linear write-to tests were next…

Plugging the drive into a 10Gb/s port increased average write performance only a little on this test, from 364.8MB/s to 393.1MB/s. However, note that the maximum speed increased by more than 50%, to 630.7MB/s, which was maintained for the 50-60 gigabytes of writes.

Samsung’s T3 drive showed a similar drop in sustained write performance, although the drop was much smoother, without the wild swings we see in the BOOST.

At 5Gb/s, the MyDigitalSSD BOOST edges our the Samsung T3 in writes, but falls slightly behind in reads. At 10Gb/s, the 629MB/s reads are the fastest we’ve ever seen for a non-PCIE SSD. The 393MB/s writes are exceeded only by a few internal SATA drives.

Linear tests are an important tool for comparing bandwidth speed between storage products, serve to highlight the consistent-bandwidth advantages of SSDs, which don’t suffer the performance drop-off that HDDs do as the test proceeds away from the fast outer edge of the disk.

In the next section we use PCMark Vantage to test real-world performance…

PCMark Vantage is an objective hardware performance benchmark tool for PCs running 32- and 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows 7. PCMark Vantage is well suited for benchmarking any type of Microsoft Windows 7 PC: from multimedia home entertainment systems and laptops, to dedicated workstations and high-end gaming rigs. Benchmark Reviews has decided to use the HDD Test Suite to demonstrate simulated real-world storage drive performance in this article.

PCMark Vantage runs eight different storage benchmarks, each with a specific purpose. Once testing is complete, results are given a PCMark score while and detailed results indicate actual transaction speeds. Again, I’m including the results for both the MyDigitalDiscount BOOST (at 5Gb/s) and the Samsung T3. As you can see the individual results are very close, with less than a 5% difference in all cases. However, the BOOST’s 10Gb/s results are quite different.

It’s interesting to compared the BOOST’s performance at 5 and 10Gb/s. The WIndows Defender, Gaming, and photo import scores are much higher. Windows Vista startup, Movie Maker, and Media Player are a bit slower; but application loading drops dramatically from 244MB/s to a mere 93MB/s, which is enough to drop the overall score as compared to the 5Gb/s score.

500GB Samsung Portable SSD T3 PCMark VantageResults

Here we see again that connecting to the faster USB port actually results in a notable poorer score than when the drive is connected to a standard USB 3 port.

In the next section, I’ll present my final thoughts and conclusion.

IMPORTANT: Although the rating and final score mentioned in this conclusion are made to be as objective as possible, please be advised that every author perceives these factors differently at various points in time. While we each do our best to ensure that all aspects of the product are considered, there are often times unforeseen market conditions and manufacturer changes which occur after publication that could render our rating obsolete. Please do not base any purchase solely on our conclusion, as it represents our product rating specifically for the product tested which may differ from future versions.

The MyDigitalDiscount BOOST 1TB SSD is a bold step forwards for external USB drives: its combination of two mSATA SSDs in RAID 0 combined with USB SuperSpeed+ support turned in the best sequential data transfer scores we’ve ever seen from a non-PCIE drive. However, the 10Gb/s connection isn’t without its drawbacks, which came in the form of much lower scores in random access and I/O operations per second. Below is a chart summarizing the performance of the BOOST 1TB drive on our benchmarks:

Test	5Gb/s	10Gb/s	% Change
AS-SSD Read	87.2MB/s	34.1MB/s	-61
AS-SSD Write	157.0MB/s	105.0MB/s	-33
ATTO Read	458MB/s	687MB/s	+50
ATTO Write	455MB/s	684MB/s	+50
Crystal Diskmark Read	174.1MB/s	35.8MB/s	-79
Crystal Diskmark Write	192.8MB/s	113.5MB/s	-41
IOMeter	22044 iOPS	9619 iOPS	-56
AIDA64 Read	401MB/s	629MB/s	+57
AIDA64 Write	365MB/s	393MB/s	+8
Vantage Overall	53144	50421	-5

As you can see, with a SuperSpeed+ connection, linear transfer performance increases dramatically, by 50% or more, in most benchmarks. On the other hand, tests that pile on queued, random transfers see a dramatic drop in performance (note that on the Crystal Diskmark and ATTO tests, the sequential performance still improved, although we’re only looking at the random performance here). This is probably due to the fact that the controllers on the Samsung SSDs are sitting “behind” an mSATA<->USB bridge chip. This poor random performance would concern me for an internal drive that the OS was installed on, but I think it’s no big deal for an external drive, which will most likely be used for backup and large data transfer tasks– and in these cases it will provide exceptional performance. If you’re a content creator, say, with a few hundred gigabytes of 4K video to move around, the BOOST is so much better than the next best solution that there’s really no choice at all.

While the BOOST is much more expensive than a terabyte-size ISB hard drive, it’s still not that expensive: its $262.12 price tag (MyDigitalDiscount | Amazon) is very competitive with slower internal SATA SSDs, and anywhere from $60 to $100 less expensive than the Samsung T3 in 1TB capacity. Even if your computer only supports USB 3 Gen 1 at 5Gb/s, the BOOST offers the same performance as the Samsung for less money in this capacity.

MyDigitalDiscount trims costs by saving on retail packaging (as shown below), and not including any utility software or documentation. While I’m indifferent to most SSD “utility” software, a backup utility would have been nice, although it can be argued that both Windows 10 and Mac OS have sufficiently robust backup software built in.There’s also no documentation, but really: how many people will need to be told how to plug in an external USB drive?

At the end of the day, this drive impresses with its class-leading price-performance ratio. And if your desktop computer doesn’t have a USB SuperSpeed+ port, you can add one via an inexpensive PCI-E card. At $262.12 (MyDigitalDiscount | Amazon), the MyDigitalSSD BOOST is your best choice today for an external SSD.

+ Outstanding performance for an external USB-powered drive
+ Best bang for the buck in external SSDs
+ Supports 10Gb/s USB-C SuperSpeed+
+ Comes with USB Type C cable for direct connection to newer computers

– Still expensive compared to traditional external drives
– No utility or backup software

Performance: 9.75
Appearance: 8.50
Construction: 9.50
Functionality: 8.50
Value: 9.50

Excellence Achievement: Benchmark Reviews Golden Tachometer Award

COMMENT QUESTION: Which brand of SSD do you trust most?

By David Ramsey

MyDigitalSSD BOOST 1TB (5Gb/s)

1TB MyDigitalSSD BOOST Benchmark Results (5Gb/s)

1TB MyDigitalDiscount BOOST SSD CrystalDiskMarkResults (5Gb/s)

1TB MyDigitalDiscount BOOST SSD CrystalDiskMarkResults (10Gb/s)

500GB Samsung Portable SSD T3 PCMark VantageResults

Excellence Achievement: Benchmark Reviews Golden Tachometer Award

By David Ramsey

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