AMD Athlon 5350 APU and AM1 Platform Review - Performance - Storage Subsystem - USB 3.0 & SSD SATA3 (6G)

Performance Storage Subsystem - USB 3.0 & SSD SATA3 (6G)

With the modern SATA and USB 3.0 controllers we started adding SSD performance numbers measured on such interfaces (when applicable). Putting these in nicely styled charts would be better, but with technology so new we just do not have anything out there yet to compare to, so here are some raw peak performance numbers. We use an A-DATA N002 Solid State Drive which has both a both SATA2 and USB 3.0 port.

Above, you can see a N002 series A-DATA Solid State Drive running over the USB 3.0 controller on this motherboard. The implementation works well. Obviously the N002 write performance is limited at roughly 200 MB/sec.

SATA 6 Gbps Performance

Below we show SATA3 6 Gbps AHCI performance with a SATA3 SSD. 

Above, the SATA3 based SSD connected to the chipset SATA3 (6Gbps) AMD controller. AHCI mode is enabled in the BIOS, especially with SSDs that helps a little on peak performance.

The performance that AMD is capable of delivering with such a low end platform is really good. These AM1 setupss would be truly excellent for file/media servers. Unfortunately the chipset only supports two SATA 6 gpbs connectors though. But yeah, get some huge HDDs, run FreeNAS and boom, you can build a very capable yet cheap NAS.