Mach Xtreme MX-ES SLC 32GB Flash Drive Review

Introduction Late last year I had a look at one of the latest flash drives to roll off the Mach Xtreme production line, featuring 16GB of SLC NAND within its slim read body and a suitably reasonable price tag to go along with it. Now, nearly a year on, I'm going to be taking a look at the 32GB SKU of the same MX-ES SLC drive that I looked at last year. As a brief re-run over the history of Mach Xtreme, they are one of the leading storage manufacturers for flash products and over the last couple of years, they have been focussing on the MX-ES line of drives with its SLC NAND design.For a few people out there, SLC is common knowledge, but for those that do not know, this refers to the build up of the NAND flash, in this case with a Single Level Cell in instead of a Multi Level Cell design that we typically see in flash drives. Over the MLC design, SLC does not suffer from the same high wear rates and at the same time offers up a better write performance. The downside of this is that SLC NAND takes up a greater space over the much denser MLC and also the production costs are also higher. As we've seen before, the MX-ES drive comes attached to a card with a plastic cover. The front side of the card is packed with information of the drive, including its five year warranty, SLC flash design and that it is 'optimised' for Asus motherboards - although the latter we showed to be inconclusive last time round with our testing. A Closer Look Measuring in at a shade over 7cm long from end to end, the MX-ES isn't the smallest drive, given its capacity, that we have seen on the market. This comes down to the use of SLC NAND, which, as mentioned on the first page, does result in a bigger die size during production, hence the larger case needed to house only 32GB of storage. The drive is finished off with a nice red metal casing and a clear plastic end through which the activity LED can be seen. Like the 16GB drive that I looked at before, the 32GB SKU is also USB3.0 driven with speeds of up to 170MB/s read and 185MB/s write promised in the specifications. Unlike some other drives that clearly have their capacity written on the case, the MX-ES is more discrete. For those with a keen eye, looking at the underside of the USB plug reveals which capacity is in hand by looking at the last three characters - 32G as seen here. Test Procedure Test system: Asus Maximus V Formula Intel Core i7 3770k Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz 16GB XFX Radeon HD 7970 Corsair H100i Corsair HX1050W Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD AOC E2795VH We would like to thank AOC, Corsair, Kingston and Lian Li for supplying us with our test system components. Many different software applications are also used to gain the broadest spectrum of results, which allows for the fairest testing possible. Software used: ATTO CrystalDiskMark Anvil’s Storage Utilities RC6 ATTO 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 manufacturers 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. Focusing on the 1024k test, the MX-ES 32GB is right on the money when it comes to rated performance, whilst the read speeds are a little under those rated bay Mach Xtreme. CrystalDiskMark CrystalDiskMark is a small HDD benchmark utility for your hard drive that enables you to rapidly measure sequential and random read/write speeds. Here are some key features of "CrystalDiskMark": Sequential reads/writes Random 4KB/512KB reads/writes Text copy Change dialog design internationalization (i18n) Looking at the real world performance figures within CDM, the drive this time round performs right to the specifications, with a notably high read speed under the 512k test as well. Anvil's Storage Utilities Anvil's Storage Utilities is a new benchmarking utility that we have started using here at eTeknix, it's completely free to download and has the ability to test mainly hard drives and solid state drives, but also any other form of storage medium that you can throw at it. As well as testing the drive in a variety of benchmarking tests, it also has a drive endurance test that consistently reads and writes data to the selected medium to give days, months and potentially even years of use in a shorter period of time to see how the drive copes in the longer term. Within Anvil's we can see that the drive outside of the sequential 4MB tests performs better during the read tests, whilst the write tests see 4k speeds dropping down to .13MB/s. Final Thoughts Pricing The MX-ES retails for just over £40 (~$64 / ~€47), which for a drive of this capacity and performance, to me is a little over priced. Granted there is going to be a price hike for the use of SLC NAND instead of MLC, but the difference in price with respect to the overall performance that is seen is not quite in balance in my mind. If the drive was around £6-8 cheaper then I would be more obliged to award the drive. Overview When it comes to choosing the right flash drive, there are so many to pick that it's ultimately going to be hard to rate them all. This also means that being able to say you're the best drive for XYZ reason is going end up being advantage in one of the most heavily swarmed markets out there. In the case of the MX-ES, having SLC NAND can be taken as both and advantage and disadvantage. In its favour, that SLC design means that the drive [on paper] will outlive other drives with a MLC design, however there is the downside as a flash drive which is size and cost. On the whole, drives are quickly becoming smaller, cheaper and more readily available, but as highlighted above, this is not cheapest option out there on the market as there are one or two slightly cheaper drives that offer similar performance. The other way to look at it is to consider if speed or capacity is the greater priority. If speed is, then by all means take this as one to put on the short-list, but if capacity is what you're after, with less of a focus on having a blazing fast transfer speed then sadly this is not the drive for you. I'm not going to leave this review saying the drive is not a choice item to buy, nor am I going to write it off saying that it's overpriced and not worth the cost. How I'm going to leave this is with a simple two sided argument that only yourself as the end user will be able to settle. If you're worried about price per GB (as many users are today), then there are better options, but if you want top speed and memory that will last longer, then the MX-ES with its SLC NAND is one to think about. Pros 5 year warranty Stylish metal design SLC NAND USB3.0 Cons Cost when marked against other 32GB USB3.0 drives for capacity Not the fastest drive on the market "On the lower end of the USB3.0 flash drive roadmap, smaller drives these days are a little restricted in performance, the MX-ES makes a bridge to this performance difference with its SLC NAND. Naturally there is a cost implication, but for some people this is worth the cost." Thank you to Overclockers UK for providing this review sample.