TEKQ Rapide Thunderbolt 3 External SSD Review

Synthetic Benchmarks

Various synthetic benchmarks are available to quickly evaluate the performance of direct-attached storage devices. Real-world performance testing often has to be a customized test. We present both varieties in this review, starting with the synthetic benchmarks in this section. Prior to covering those, we have a quick look at our testbed setup and testing methodology.

Testbed Setup and Testing Methodology

Evaluation of DAS units on Windows is done with the testbed outlined in the table below. For devices with a Thunderbolt 3 Type-C interface (such as the TEKQ Rapide that we are considering today), we utilize the Thunderbolt 3 port enabled by the Intel Alpine Ridge controller. It connects to the Z170 PCH via a PCIe 3.0 x4 link.

The full details of the reasoning behind choosing the above build components can be found here. The list of DAS units used for comparison purposes is provided below. Not all benchmarks are available for all units, as our testing has evolved over the years, and more than three years have passed since the LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt and the d2 Thunderbolt 2 - SSD were evaluated. It must also be kept in mind that those two devices were evaluated using the Thunderbolt 2 port from our Z97-based Haswell testbed.

• TEKQ Rapide Thunderbolt 3 SSD 240GB (exFAT)
• TEKQ Rapide Thunderbolt 3 SSD 240GB (NTFS)
• LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt 500GB
• LaCie d2 Thunderbolt 2 - SSD 128GB

Synthetic Benchmarks - ATTO and Crystal DiskMark

TEKQ claims read and write speeds of 2700 MBps and 1500 MBps respectively, and these are backed up by the ATTO benchmarks provided below. Unfortunately, these access traces are not very common in real-life scenarios.

Drive Performance Benchmarks - ATTO

TEKQ Rapide Thunderbolt 3 SSD 240GB (exFAT)LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt 500GB

CrystalDiskMark, despite being a canned benchmark, provides a better estimate of the performance range with a selected set of numbers. As evident from the screenshot below, the performance can dip to as low as 46 MBps for low queue-depth random accesses.

Drive Performance Benchmarks - CrystalDiskMark

TEKQ Rapide Thunderbolt 3 SSD 240GB (exFAT)LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt 500GB