Test functionality of current hardware and software: storage benchmarking

I can't really call a MicroSD or USB drive a disk, they are not spinning rust but nanometer feature sized flash cells.  The RPI3 appears to either use the USB interface for the MicroSD drive or there is some other limit which makes the USB and MicroSD drives perform almost identically.  The following graphs from iozone compare the SanDisk SDSQUNC 032G MicroSD card running Raspbian with a random 8GB PNY thumb drive I have on my keychain.  I formatted the USB drive with EXT4, and the MicroSD was formatted by NOOBS with EXT4 when installing Raspbian.

 Write performance is critical for recording.  Average write of 300 Mb/s for most file sizes and record sizes will be quite adequate for stereo or 4 channel recording at 192k/s by 32 bit.

MicroSD vs USB ext4 iozone write

By way of comparison, here is the SanDisk/RPI3 combination against an aging Pentium III with UDMA 100 Maxtor drives.  I have some antique systems to compare with, they recorded audio in their day as well.

RPi3 MicroSD vs Pentium III Maxtor UDMA 100 iozone write