Macworld - USA (2019-09)

OCTOBER 2019 MACWORLD 37

fastest in several tests, including
CrystalDiskMark 6, shown below.
As you can see below, you get those
highly desirable, super quick NVMe seek
times, though for some reason, most likely

a testing aberration, the 970 EVO was a

tad slow with the reads. Another Shell test

with the WD Black SN750 showed a 0.031

millisecond seek—twice as quick and par

for the course.

As I explained,

the 48GB copy

tests shown below

weren’t completely

fair, as the 970

EVO I employed in

the Shell was only

500GB, while the

X5’s was 1TB. The

EVO slows to

below 1GBps when

it runs out of

secondary cache,

which is provided

in proportion to

capacity, so the X5

ran out later and

turned in a quicker

time. Same with the

Intel 905P in the

Akitio Node Lite.

As to that heat,

the Shell has an

advantage over

the X5 in that it

can shed it faster

through its all-

metal shell and will

likely throttle

The Fledging Shell with a 970 EVO inside showed lots of throughput
potential under CrystalDiskMark 6.

0 1,000 2,000 3,000

Sequential Write (Q = 32, T = 1)

CRYSTALDISKMARK 6 (MBps)

2,449

Higher scores are better

2,418

2,372

Sequential Read (Q = 32, T = 1)

2,790

2,804

2,711

Fledging Shell (970 EVO) Samsung X5 Akito Node Lite

We’re not sure why the slightly slow read seek result. Most likely it was
simply normal testing deviation.

0 0.020 0.060 0.080

Access time (Write)

AS SSD 2.0 SEEK PERFORMANCE (Milliseconds)

0.038

Lower scores are better

0.039

0.035

Access time (Read)

0.075

0.046

0.023

0.040

Fledging Shell (970 EVO) Samsung X5 Akito Node Lite