Quote:
Originally Posted by tomsem
Yes, I thought this should be something someone would have benchmarked but could not find anything searching the web.
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Exactly. I was frustrated trying to find realistic information.
One of the good things about using an external drive with an iPad is that one doesn’t have to pay Apple for a very large built in storage capacity because they can probably make due with a lower built in amount and use an external storage device which is generally a lot less expensive option. For example, with my usage 64GB built in storage is plenty for everything I do. I could even use it to edit a 20GB video file if I was into videography. But I couldn’t store very many files that size. Using an external drive would allow me to store them there and write them to the iPad one at a time for editing, if I wanted to. But if this method takes an excruciatingly long time to transfer these big files back and forth, then it might not be such a good option as I had hoped for.
I too searched the internet for realistic READ/WRITE speeds which various external drives could provide with newer iPads, but found very little. You cannot expect to compare the multitude of available storage devices to one another for use with an iPad, which means purchasing one is pretty much a crap shoot. From my tests of the few USB 3.0 external storage devices I already own, I found that one of my flash drives has a much faster WRITE speed than the more expensive SSD drive when it came to using it with my iPad Air 2020. The READ speed of the flash drive was rated at up to 150MB/s whereas the SSD READ speed was listed as up to 440MB/s. That surprised me. I know WRITE speeds are typically slower than READ speeds, but the manufactures didn’t even list WRITE speeds for any of my devices.
At any rate, if
anyone here has a newer iPad and one or more external storage devices that are at least USB 3.0 or later, and you don’t mind testing the READ/WRITE speeds you get when using them with a newer iPad, please post the results. Please include which iPad you used and the external storage device name and port specs (e.g. USB 3.0, USB 3.1 gen 1, USB 3.1 gen 2, USB 3.2). To calculate the speed you can divide the [file size in MB] by [number of sec to READ or WRITE]. Please post both READ and WRITE speeds. I used my iPhone’s stopwatch feature to get the times. This isn’t a scientific paper, so no need for super accurate readings.