We start the tests with the HDTachRW software. The software measures the sequential read speed, the random access speed and sequential write speed.

The reading speed was pretty stable throughout the complete SSD and was 251.9 MB/s on average. Lexar promised a 450MB/s for read but that's typically happens with the specific benchmark:

We move on to the HD Tune Pro software, another utility we used to measure the drive's reading and writing performances. Although not necessarily representative of real-world workloads, HD Tune's targeted tests give us a glimpse of each drive's raw capabilities.

The sequential reading test returned a 237.7 MB/s average speed, confirming the figures given by the HDTach benchmark.

Below you see some additional random reading tests. The Lexar drive gave a 289.283 MB/s average reading speed for an 1MB transfer size and a 264.940 MB/s average reading for transferring files with random sizes - an not so fast performance compared to other SSDs.

In the corresponding random write test, the SSD wrote files with random sized at 264.940 MB/s and 1MB files a little faster, at 289.283 MB/s. Smaller 4KB files were written at 36.573 MB/s:

HD Tune's file benchmark also features three data patterns available that can be used during the write process: zero, random and mixed, which is a combination of zeroes and random data. Certain SSDs use a compression technique which improves performance when compressible data is used. For these devices the results will be highest when writing zeroes and lowest when writing random data.

Let's start with a sequential transfer speed of a 500MB file using zeros in the writing part:

The Lexar DD512 SSD read the 500MB file at an average speed of 320.731 MB/s and wrote the file at 200.504 MB/s . The 4K random single performance with 4096 byte blocks was just 3719 IOPS for reading and 2863 IOPS for writing, which are very low. When we enabled the 32 requests option, both figures were even lowered down to 3185 IOPS and 3071 IOPS for both read/write, respectively.

Selecting the "Random" data pattern (zeroes and data) had not any serious impact to drive's sequential read performance, but made the 4K random read test seven slower that previously:

Selecting the "mixed" data pattern did not have any significant impact in the drive's performance:

Below you see some additional sequential and random reading tests: