We can see that the Seagate Backup Plus external storage drives do support NCQ and UASP. This assumes that the host port / drivers on the PC support UASP. If the numbers for the two access traces are in the same ballpark, NCQ / UASP is not supported. The plain '4K' ones are similar to the '4K Q32T1' except that only a single queue and single thread are used.Ĭomparing the '4K Q32T1' and '4K' numbers can quickly tell us whether the storage device supports NCQ (native command queuing) / UASP (USB-attached SCSI protocol). The plain 'Seq' traces use a 1MiB block size. The 'Seq Q32T1' sequential traces use 128K block size with a queue depth of 32 from a single thread, while the '4K Q32T1' ones do random 4K accesses with the same queue and thread configurations. Internally, CrystalDiskMark uses the Microsoft DiskSpd storage testing tool. Two of the traces are sequential accesses, while two are 4K random accesses. Real-world performance testing is done with our custom test suite involving robocopy bencharks and PCMark 8's storage bench.ĬrystalDiskMark uses four different access traces for reads and writes over a configurable region size. CrystalDiskMark is used for a quick performance overview. The testbed hardware (the Thunderbolt 3 / USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C port enabled by the Alpine Ridge host controller in the Hades Canyon NUC) is reused. Our evaluation routine for hard-drive based direct-attached storage devices borrows heavily from the testing methodology for flash-based direct-attached storage devices.

Seagate backup plus slim for mac review